More Signal, Less Noise

Or, More Authentic Voices By All Means Necessary

*These remarks were delivered at the recent ACM SIGDOC Conference (“Emerging Technologies, Ongoing Challenges” 10/21/24) which I was honored to participate in; find out more about this organization and their mission here.

So, I’m at once an obvious but perhaps unusual voice to weigh in on this topic, as I’ve been deeply involved in the artistic world as well as the corporate one—but developing and utilizing an ability to communicate effectively has, for better or worse, been the through line of my life’s work to this point. All of which is to say, I think deeply, if not obsessively about the tension between communication and community, promoting awareness and inclusion while also maintaining guardrails and sensible policies to protect. Indeed, wars have been fought over this, and depending on what you read or believe, a very sophisticated and expensive war is being waged right now.

As a writer, educator, and advocate, I’ve studied the idea of story and how it works, and I’m convinced that narrative—how we perfect and share it—is the connecting tissue of all human endeavors, from art and entertainment to business and politics. We are all trying to sell something or build a brand or persuade others to join our cause or celebrate our achievements, or recoil at injustice or motivate the alienated, etc.

Here's the bad news, and it’s not a new phenomenon: the cultural battle of the 21^st C is not necessarily between good and evil; it’s between chaos and silence. This is why we have to choose sides. This is why we can’t to let super-affluent cynics with the least to lose lull us into a state of impotent rage or, worse, apathy. Because aside from the ceaseless class warfare they will instigate, their ultimate ambition is to render the literate and sentient amongst us fed up and indifferent. Without awareness, and with no resistance, they can more easily continue their unchecked assault on our collective well-being.

One thing I’m convinced of, from my years as a tech analyst—where I wrote often about the intersection of innovation and culture—and inside academia and as an artist and arts advocate, is that technology is always with us; my non-profit, 1455, is named after the year Gutenberg’s printing press started producing books at scale, arguably the signal cultural and artistic achievement of the last millennium; for the first time, the act of communicating via the written word was liberated, permanently, from the controlling hands of the clergy and the elite; Gutenberg provided the impetus for libraries and a free press, the performance of plays, and the act of translation; it’s been a non-stop series of improvements and occasional controversies ever since.

It’s undeniable that, on balance, the internet and its myriad applications, from email to search engines, has democratized content, enabling those with less resources to have their voices heard, chances for the marginalized to avoid erasure. Indeed, as a tech analyst at the Consumer Technology Association, I wrote an extended white paper in 2008 predicting that Twitter would revolutionize the dissemination of information; free market fans had long maintained that INFORMATION WANTED TO BE FREE (a very complicated notion that always needs to be unpacked and demystified—as always, and short version: to see where enthusiastic proselytizers are coming from, follow the money) but Twitter and the ascendency of social media seemed to strike a meaningful blow against autocrats and censorship: even in countries without a functioning press, citizens could commit journalism, in real time, and have it shared, freely and immediately, around the globe.

This remains true, and it’s still worth celebrating….but it’s complicated. What optimists like myself didn’t account for –and I’ll defend us by saying it’s not that we were mistaken so much as we were insufficiently skeptical—is that agents of evil could utilize and manipulate these tools as effectively, and easily, as good faith actors. As such, we have curated content, CEOs suppressing info, “alternative facts” and fake news. AI is already raising the stakes considerably: a person used to literally remain in their home office and receive only the news they wished to hear; now a person can roam the world wide net and still remain almost entirely in an incubated cocoon, and where the societal mechanisms of shame used to keep certain cretins in their own basements, racists and actual Nazis can now find solidarity, and organize accordingly. This is where we need sensible oversight and consensus to remove constraints but encourage expression (The alternatives are censorship or media being controlled by the few and powerful—both of which are intolerable in a democracy).

I’ve talked about tech, and I anticipate one question would be: how do I reconcile my mission to celebrate and explore storytelling in light of the fact that every other article one reads mentions AI and the myriad ways this technology will imperil art, if not civilization. My hot take? Relax. Computers and their ever-advanced algorithms can reproduce and even mimic, but they lack (at least) two things separating creativity from counterfeit: originality and soul. It seems worth suggesting that, among many other things, art—and any kind of worthwhile communication, written, drawn, or filmed—is antithetical to short cuts. That’s the crux, and generally speaking, is true of any achievement: there are no “hacks” to become a proficient musician, painter, or athlete; even granting that appraisals of art are subjective there’s an assumed authority (on the part of both creator and critic) that imparts, if not authority, credibility. One danger I’m constantly aware of is the ever-increasing proliferation of charlatans who traffic in false hope: the same rules always apply: if the path to mastery was simple enough to explain in a book, everyone could do it, everyone would do it. Hard work, alas, is everything, and there’s no way around it, but as every successful person knows, what you gain and learn from such diligence justifies the labor, even—perhaps especially—if you can’t count your success in monetary terms. The formula, it seems to me, remains finding joy in the work, meaning in the journey—the way you live is the story of your life and in this sense, everyone is a storyteller.

So: Where does this leave us, as writers, entrepreneurs, decision-makers, creatives?

Of course, all forms of expression need to be as inclusive, accessible, and encouraged as possible. In using the maxim “create the world you want to live in” I founded 1455 with the broad goal of celebrating storytelling, but also building community, and micro communities, via expression—which includes allstorytellers, but also those who enjoy stories. If we include artists and audiences, we’re leaving no one behind. I publish Movable Type, an e-zine that features poems, stories, essays, and artwork, I’ve put on festivals that convene panelists and experts from a variety of communities, and I do what I can, with my resources and wallet, to showcase under-represented voices. In an attempt to meaningfully engage with the younger generations that will one day lead us, I accepted the offer to collaborate with Shenandoah University, and I now direct their Center for Story (indeed, we just had our inaugural story festival yesterday that featured historians, journalists, poets, economists, and professors). In short, I’ve spent the majority of my life creating and sharing my own work, but I’ve found a similarly urgent sense of purpose in promoting the work of others, and doing whatever I can to give voice to the very people our world desperately needs to hear more from.

Everything is changing, but not much has changed: the winners do write history and the good guys don’t always win. As ever, more authentic voices will be the antidote to impersonal technologies and the people using them to disempower those without access. All of which is to say, the need for personal narrative is as imperative and empowering as ever, and the ability to share these stories has never been more accessible, more possible. Not for nothing, there’s a direct correlation between our society’s increasingly dire empathy gap and the ceaseless deprecation of Humanities degrees. The best work we can do, whatever our job titles are, is helping provide space for storytellers to connect, sharing resources to assist and inspire creativity anywhere, and everywhere. Our jobs, as human beings with increasingly urgent table stakes, is finding ways to engage in positive dialogue and opportunities to enrich, by all means necessary.