An evening's conversation on personal, conceptual, and creative integrity with Kyle

6.30pm — midnight

Key ideas (in no particular order)

• What do we mean when we talk about work?
  Arose from the question of whether my explorations in tools to support non-linear thinking and heavily situated/referential writing are ‘work’ or not, given that actively eschew the potential of making money from this. Also Kyle’s consideration of whether his work (which he enjoys) qualifies.
• We talked about the need to communicate intentions clearly. Our specific focus was on being able to make requests, safe in the knowledge that the other will refuse if they are not available for that (Jess a powerful archetype here for me.), rather than wasting cycles trying to first intuit if they are open to it, but this generalised into the two below concepts.
  • Effective collaboration builds on a foundation of alignment
  • Substantive collaboration occurs within a strong shared context
• Integrity is the fuel of meaningful work
  I expressed my belief that my failure to pursue creative projects when I was younger arose from the spiritual and creative exhaustion of living a non-integral life. By lying, and making assumptions about other people, I was unwittingly expending the creative potential I had on the construction of an imagined story about the world, a story that made me miserable. The experiences and the people I have been so lucky to meet over the last few years have shown me how a commitment to truth, the practice of total integrity, restores that potential.
• Integrity is un-fakeable, you can’t ‘fake it til you make it’ because that is inherently un-integral. Integrity is embodied. Unlike fakery, integrity both acknowledges that we can have doubts, and gives us the tools to overcome those doubts through integral openness and experimentation. Kyle offered Martha Beck’s work as identifying that outward integrity is the force that can restore the inner integrity that we (individually and culturally) may have lost through repeatedly ignoring the voice that tells us something might be wrong.
• We’re drawn to the irreducible, but that isn’t enough, the substance of a work must be reworked and reinterpreted, to be reified. See The library below for examples of works containing irreducible concepts.
• Until we stop selling stuff, we’re hooped.
  Something I said that stuck out to Kyle as a tight synthesis of my beliefs about the inherent threat of money to our integrity. This will be a point of focus over the winter as Kyle and I seek to experiment with whether this threat can be managed.
  Possible archetypes in support of this,
  • an independent director Kyle follows
  • Craig Mod. I offered Craig as a notable archetype of the 1000 true fans model for sustaining integral creative work.
  • Andy Matuschak. Andy is effectively crowdfunding a research grant for himself.
• Creative integrity is built on a foundation of personal integrity. Only then can personal integrity itself be reified by integrity in the creative act.
• Yes Man (2005, Danny Wallace) until abundance, Hell Yeah or No (2020, Derek Sivers) in abundance. A conclusion reached by considering Jess as an archetype of the Hell yes philosophy, while Kyle and I are inclined to think there is more nuance, that Hell yes only works from a position of abundance, and reaching abundance requires a posture of yes (almost) everywhere.
• Integrity requires a context of use.
• Story is everything.
• Everything must end. (Something Srmi said about Islam fits here, the practice of appreciating things before they’re over.)
• What does Life expect from you today? Antidote to the cycle where excitement can easily mutate into existential paralysis. See Kyle’s The Question I ask Myself Every Morning.
• The (inherent?) role of spirituality in the creative act.
• Binaries are bad. Very little that is integral or interesting is binary.
• Repetition is powerful (Kyle has good archetypes here: long running comics & anime), but can be corrupted if status/money infect the creative mind (see Scale below).
• Where there is money there is always a threat to both personal and conceptual integrity.
• Scale is the killer (of both creativity and community). The (understandable) desire to reproduce something that worked/moved/succeeded is the very thing that kills it. Greed is the engine of scale, money is the currency of greed.
• Authentic creativity openly situates itself within the pantheon of prior-art
  • See Imitation is more integral than repetition in generating novel creative directions
  • The best ideas have already been written, they only need re-contextualising.
  • Copyright distorts some part of this work.
• Discrete, finished projects are the essential artefacts of meaningful work

Not directly explored in the nights conversation, but relevant to above topics

• Accumulation is not a substitute for creative work

Winter experiments in creativity

• Create a photo book.
• Create lots of small things: zines, animations, essays, drawing, sculpture. These can serve as diversions, allowing us to return to an idea with greater clarity and conceptual integrity.
• Make public my personal financial situation before ever accepting a dollar.
• Kyle to experiment with creating for young people. spirituality, meaning making
• Kyle and I co-creating a public project that has a posture that is open to making money on the basis of complete transparency. Acknowledging my scepticism about money, but committing to exploring whether money can coexist with integrity.
• Enrich one or more influential creative artefacts within the context of its creation. Prime candidate for me is Susan Sontag’s On Photography. The goal is an exhaustively referenced/situated expansion of the book. eg. Every referenced photographer, essay, film, should be drawn into an organically growing library (A healthy entity expands at the edges).
  • I have a pie in the sky hope that I might one day convince the Sontag estate/rights holders to release the original into the public domain, or make a specific release so this work could be distributed widely.
    Kyle proposed a alternative form of this that seems more plausible in the current copyright landscape: approach the rights holders with the completed work and ask them if they’d want to sell it. This has a couple of things going for it. Rights holders want to make money, so they might seriously consider it and, I don’t want money for it so they can have all the profits if they want, which might sway them.
• Iterate on this ad-hoc set of tools for non-linear thinking that I’ve been developing. Likely the most effective next step is to get them in front of other people. Kyle and Avvai are both very interested in the concept, so that’s users 2 & 3. I’ll keep the group small so the feedback loop can remain tight and effective (Enacted experiences require tight action–feedback loops).

Near term writing (Silas)

• The ideas at the core of this vision
• Financial context
• The potency (even inevitability?) of money to rob us of integrity.
• What is Conceptual Integrity?

The library — what artefacts represent our shared mythology?

Kyle and I discussed two books tonight that contain potentially irreducible ideas, both of which were transformative in his life, and I’ve added some that have been similarly impactful for me,

• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946
• Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity, 2021.
  Reification of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a device for an integral narrative.
• don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997.
  A breathtaking presentation of a framework for healthy relating.
• Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, 1992.
  Substantial for me in the clarity of Quinn’s definition of culture as people enacting a story together.
• Susan Sontag, On Photography
• Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom
• Joy mentioned that Richard Carlson’s Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff is “one of those must reads in life”, so that could be interesting too.