The third essay as part of my SHIFT fellowship, a voice-note on asynchronous communication. The second, “Safety Checks and Money [B]orders,” can be read here and you can visit the learning garden of all fellows’ work.
It is Friday October 29th and I am currently in Kansas City, Missouri. It's been raining here for a week straight. The landscape is…vibrant in it's wetness and in the gradient of fiery orange burst of molting trees. A welcome thirst quenched from the desertification of California where the rains are rare but torrential this year.
This morning at 1 AM, I was two coffees in and hunched on a couch surrounded by my cousin's fighting cats practicing my animal whispering. I'm also tardy in submitting this quarter's paper. I could attribute that to what I'm currently synced to (for example: detoxing from productivity and visibility culture, grieving the recent crisis in my homeland Afghanistan, nomadic migrations across the country to reconnect with family, getting present with the wisdom in each thing and way of being, monitoring my screen nutrition and immersing into a field of intuitively guided study unbounded by time or genre.)
OR
I could attribute that to a very intentional all-nighter that coalesces a few weeks worth of undocumented ruminations into a pressure cooked offering for the good people at Somewhere Good.
Both are true.
I'm both withholding my energy and expending it in the exact cadence and format that feels best to my nervous system. Asynchronous communication and how it is understood among digital technologists can allow us to govern our labor by our own personal realities and cycles. May we find ourselves in a posture of life and therefore apt to giving and creating or in a posture of death and therefore apt to deconstructing and retreating, or somewhere in the middle of that space in a dance of transmutation and compost. These ebbs and flows are integral in knowing how to hold space for each other in the circuitous game of life, death and life again.
In the echo chamber of pandemia and personal/collective crises, this gentle accommodation reminds us that we are human first. That our bodies are important to consider as we plug ever deeper into digital cohabitation. That our biorhythms, sensory sensitivity and regulatory functions are vital co-creators. This is what interests me most, not necessarily how this form of communication is quote “useful for achieving maximum efficiency” end quote (to quote gitHub), but how we can delight in being Bodied.
In being of a rhythm, frequency and cadence that experiences pleasure and harm in a way that does not compare to a non-sentient, securely encased phone screen, or a classroom of laptops chained to desks in a digital lab—the fragments of our imagination in these technologies have us burnt out. The balance between doing and being has been severely disrupted by our modern work and social habits. As we become more bodied, how do our surroundings and environment play a role in our right timingness when it comes to communication and co-creation?
And a side note—I've had a hard time with the term “delight” as I'm recovering from lingo associated with customer retention strategies AKA “surprise and delight,” and so would propose we look at this with new verbiage. Still TBD on that.
Super side note: I asked a dear friend just the other night what would be delightful about roaming on an asynchronous digital platform and he replied, “being at a computer with a fifth of whiskey next to you.” Umm not my preference, but I thought it was funny, because while it is hard to understand what can feel delightful about screen time for me personally right now, I do know that my environment and placement is a big part of the equation and something I don't want to forget as necessary in our time-space and space-time intimacies.
I believe if our self governance structures are rooted in the natural cycles to which our bodied reality is attuned to, we can flip how we think about Chronos, or time, to ease us more into beingness than the doingness with which asynch in my opinion is attempting to alleviate.
At 2 AM, I struggle with where I'm going with the ideas in this response..the prompts always provoke more questions and I'm feeling a little too autonomous through this co-creation process. I guess I will start with my first instinct, which was to contextualize some of the words used so maybe I will try that now.
Autonomous:
Um well, autonomy implies a sort of independence and separateness from others. I don't believe we ever truly act autonomously or individually to begin with. We are a concert of collectivity, an orchestra of movements incepted into what seem to be individual gestures only by nature of our human centrism. Collective consciousness, and even culture itself, is its own autonomous force. These entities signal to us, too. They tell us when we are ready to retire certain constructs or functions, and where emergent needs arise on a mass scale. What feels individual in this context is perhaps our personal roles within the matrix of collective consciousness. Some of us are great translators, conductors or artists of this vast information and wisdom. And others are architects or critics of this information.
So as we're thinking about what roles were playing, and as we’re thinking about autonomous co-creation, I'm also curious how we think about authority. How are we dispersing the power to make decisions to fail, to succeed in your outcomes?
What else, too, do notifications look like that don't infringe on personal privacy? I personally am not a fan of my movements or presence being monitored or watched, but do understand that that is table stakes in some ways with how we conduct our digital presence. So what are the signals and customization features that can be created to help appease visibility preferences and privacy? How can we do this in a way that takes the paranoia, projection and self-centered criticism out of asynchronous messaging? So-and-so person isn't getting back to me but they're clearly posting, is there something about me that's wrong why am I not important enough to get back to, or their priorities are all wrong. To me autonomy is not getting caught up in someone else's form of self-governance or taking it personally. And so creative boundaries through product features, through digital environments in this case, might help people cocoon themselves in the ways that are best suited to them.
Okay looking at co-create or co-creating, co-creation:
Even in the writing of this is an autonomous co-creation between myself, Google, Apple and each of the family members housing me. How can we consider the dynamics individuals are embedded into and expand that idea of autonomy? Because we are never really solely self-governing, we are interdependent, we must acknowledge the unseen labor that goes into co-creation, whether that is a citation that pens your conceptual collab with an author or a prayer that acknowledges the past forces beings and stewards that created the conditions for our present creations. We are never creating in silos.
My impulse to produce is informed by a system of dynamics that one could say are invisibly functioning much like our autonomic nervous system. Rituals of creation are playing on loop in the form of background music and incense, snack platters, witty retorts…this mythodology is a collab between a comfortable beingness and a generative doingness.
So when I see beyond the individual, I scale up to see the collective as autonomous body, all the way down to our microbiological bodies. How are we co-creating with our microbiomes, the conditions to get our guts, our insight machines, in order? How do we co-create overthinking or worry with our spleens? Where does this invisible, yet automatic, co-creation exist when we think of bodied emotions, as practices like traditional Chinese medicine teach us. Where are these feelings and conditions encoded in our organs and in our systems? How can we witness these collaborators as a part of the ecosystem of our labor?
Asynch:
In my asynchronous exchanges with friends, I have a ritual of inviting my environment into the conversation. Contextualizing my presence in this way helps me feel more intimate with everyone. Describing the weather, how I am sitting, what I'm craving, how I'm currently leaned up against a damp wooden post and the smell of smoke and mildew fills the air.
While this is a conversation on time, place also feels like a really important factor in how we sync with each other. How can we place ourselves when in communication? How can our disembodied voices and body holograms maintain roots in the real world? How can our thinking come from the body and not just the mind? Can asych give us the space and place to speak in a more embodied way?
Just a future trip for a second, I wonder if through the rise of voice and video communique more attention and grooming will be placed on our vocal boxes and screen visible face-neck-shoulders. And what then does this compound in terms of conversations on ability or perceptibility? Some things to think about.
And can we talk about synchronicity?
At 3AM I'm typing out a web search, “NSYNC name origin.”
I wondered if synchronicity had anything to do with the origin of NSYNC’s band name. While one of their mothers thought how in-sync their voices were, in harmony, it also happened to be a play on the last letter in each of their names: JustiN, ChriS, JoeY, JasoN, and JC. It also just so happens that Justin, the first in that line of names, was the first to leave the band and make a solo career happen. The in, or “N” in JustiN, leaves the sync. So they are no longer in harmony, and Justin is Justified in this decision, as per the name of his debut solo album.
While these thoughts are asynchronous in how they arise over time, over the span of years, there is an intriguing meaningful connection between those points of communication. I wonder how we can play with patterns such as these in the product development process. How crumbs of encoded meaning can create stories, prophecies or take the work out of iteration rooted in protocol, and instead infuse play synchronistically as one continues to redraft their design.
At 4:44 AM I've just come back to my laptop after spending a great deal of time distracted on my phone. Scrolling on social media, fact-checking silly things about pop culture, screenshotting books that stoke me. Creating uninhabitable conditions for the ideas in my mind so they jump out on to this doc.
I am not perfect, I do not have perfect ways, I am prone to miscalculate, faff around, accumulate and on and on.
I crave Fallibility Frameworks. As we remember our humanness, we cannot forget how prone we are to error. Are there frameworks in which we can assume the inevitability of error? Error as an initiatory passage into new possibilities. As an opportunity to re-prioritize or expand one's ability to remain steadfast through discomfort. In a world where billionaires like Elon Musk can literally have a product that can explode or catch fire at random and still be a billionaire, I wonder how we can be more gentle in holding people to account for poor communication or ill-informed references. How can we hold people tenderly through things when, compared to the stakes that exist for certain people who get the pass, do not exist in equal measure for the everyday person.
Insert sub tweet about cancel culture, but I'm just too tired to even use that phrase anymore.
Onward!
In what I've read in the “trades,” or industry magazines and sites about asynch, it seems that failure of communication is a call for synchronous or face-to-face / real-time meetings and touch points. But what if that failure is instead a call for creativity rather than a fix or a response by synchronous behaviors and meetings? I think of Jack Halberstam's work in The Queer Art of Failure.
What if failure is a privilege? That we get to mess up, and perhaps get a remarkable answer or just figure out how to communicate better. What return or reward can be garnered from the investment into failures? How can we really fail if failure is a part of the equation?
At 5:30 AM, I'm thinking about all the ways I failed in my queerness and my queerness failed me. How we sometimes were not aligned in our expectations of each other but that misalignment taught us to be elastic. It taught us to be the spectrum instead of extracting it for a purpose: i.e. to attract, to signal to someone else, to perform, to ascend the ranks of invisibility from an invisible place…
just be
just breathe
At 7 AM, in the wake of this surf, I've found myself sitting with a rough draft and little desire to refine after this short line of questioning on failure. I might have failed to tie loose thoughts or provocations together, but that is my geolocation right now—my Synch City. It's a place that is a little disheveled, ephemeral and fallible, though not without some thought starters I hope.
As a fun experiment in conjuring synchronous dialogue through asynchronous communiques, I am thinking of Shuya at this moment, wondering how or if she will wax quantum about asynch digitality. I wonder if Emmerline will ground us fellows into dialogue with each other in tender acknowledgement of all we are holding in this
[Phone rings in stargaze ringtone. Voices speak in Dari.]
Hawa: Yes?
Mom: Hawa Jaan?
Hawa: Hello Mama Jaan.
Mom: Hello my sweet. How are you, my child? Are you well?
Hawa: Good thank you, how are you?
Mom: Good thank you. Today I was a little busy, then I wanted to go to the market, but it didn’t happen, so I am home right now.
Hawa: I myself am busy right now but I can call you after this.
Mom: Ok, I await your call.
Hawa: Ok
Mom: Ok, may God protect you.
Hawa: Love youuu
Mom: I love you too
Hawa: Goodbye
Mom: Goodbye
[Mom hangs up]
I wonder if Emerline will ground us fellows into dialogue with each other in tender acknowledgement of all we are holding in this tenth month of the year. I can hear Mandy's eyes scanning from a sacred space. Humphrey is listening with a premonitory knowing and yet responds with a shriek of purity. Legacy is expertly in many places at once and yet wholly present. Van is giving so much—I hope they remember to hold the heart space for a manifold return of their love. And Naj is on the precipice of precipices, and I hope she remembers we are holding her.
These are all projections, possibilities or conjurings depending on how you look at it, and that is where the delight is for me. It's in that mystery, which is appropriate considering we've entered Scorpio season. The willingness to stand both correct and corrected…when you hit the send button
at 10AM.
~~~
PostScript: I wanted to do this weaving of thoughts from notes and improvisation and just some things I've been thinking about in the ethers as both a practice in asynchronous communication, and also as a way to gather myself with the conditions that are available to me in this moment. For bringing ideas down-to-earth…which I feel tenderly about, because there is so much processing that's happening in the background and in the depths. And so, I thank you for listening to this two-part uh transmission. This two-part asynchronous transmission thanks to the lovely intermission of my mother calling me in between.
So yeah. Lots of love and thoughts from this beautiful park in Kansas City.
Can't wait to talk to you all.
~~~
outro ♫ —> moth porsesh by acidafghan
SYNCH CITY