Who owns your story?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you, my friend?

Chris Oh, my God. This is like the podcast episode from hell.

Scott Or maybe from heaven. Who knows? Depending on how it works out. But this is interesting because for listeners, this is like the back end of the podcasting story. So Chris and I generally have a pretty tight tech setup, and we very seldom ever have technical difficulties. But we're moving. We want to experiment with Clubhouse, the new app that's the rage among the young people, as they say, and the old people, too. And we wanted to try to experiment with sort of having a studio audience capacity in our podcast. And so we've recorded, we've tried to record twice now. And each episode was fantastic. And the second one was even better than the first. And we lost both of the recordings. It was so like, I think it was so frustrating the second time too, because like I said, I loved the first episode we did.

Chris We reached insights that it was honey dripping from your lips, man. It was that good.

Scott Absolutely. It's one of the virtues of the medium I found really enjoyable. We've had that experience together a lot, and our listeners have shared feedback. They appreciate that. You and I have oftentimes used this format for our Just for our own intellectual journeys. And it's been really rewarding over the past couple of years. And now we're going to start this episode with our question for the third time. Who owns your story?

Chris So let's give, you know. When we were workshopping, you know, so what are some of the next questions that we're going to be exploring? I really loved our thinking around this question, you know, and to me it's like this campfire. um from which there are many interesting paths that that you can explore um you know it it kind of there's some obvious questions or some obvious topics to flow out from this question about who owns your story now i mean one of them obviously you know kind of has to do with With, you know, data privacy and data collection and, you know, what some people call surveillance capitalism, kind of this idea that, you know, we are weaving these stories in public, you know, and often on social media platforms now. And so there's a kind of literal question about who owns that. Who owns that data? Who owns that profile of me? What control do I have over it? How does it have control over me? Just in our modern digital life, there's that pathway from the campfire of this question. I think that there's another really interesting pathway around This relationship that we each have now between sort of the person that I project into the world I kind of advertised this as who Chris is and how that persona can actually take on a life of its own. Sometimes can come back and even attack me, the person, and suddenly your own identity kind of runs away with you. It's no longer in your control. There's that kind of phenomenon of how we can get torn apart. Online for being, you know, perhaps from our perspective, misunderstood.

And then I think there's kind of a third pathway, at least for me. It kind of relates to the whole digital identity thing, but it's sort of this realization that we are the content that we consume. That the more I tell my story to a watchful world, Then the more that world understands what I'm interested in and feeds me that filtered content, which then sort of creates the raw material from which I tell the next chapter. And so, you know, it starts to become this kind of relationship, this sort of this dialectic between what I've said, you know, what I've put out to the world and what the world is now putting back at me. So that, you know, in some ways, yes, I'm still the author of my story. And in some ways, the more that I author it in public, the less that I have control over what gets written next. And somehow this one question opens up all of these avenues of conversation. And I'm just really excited to have this conversation with you for the third time.

Scott There are so many things that you just said that made me think. One of the first things that comes to mind is this kind of classic philosophical, anthropological sort of debate. Does human nature change? Right. And you've got certain people that think basically human nature, despite cultural differences and technological advances, that largely remains the same. And there are people like Heidegger that think really human being changes, that being, he calls it, I guess in German it's Dasein, being, human being really changes with time and culture. And, you know, it does seem to me that What we're talking about, this development of the avatar self, right? You've got not just your inner self, you know, people credit St. Augustine in Confessions with creating the interior self. Because, you know, when you read Homer, these characters like don't have interior selves, right? But after Augustine, no one can think without thinking about my interior self and then my self in the world. But now, like you're saying, there's this third projected self. And I just tend to think that that changes what it means to be a person when you have another self to manage, right? And then, as you were saying, the complicated thing is it's a self over which agency, to figure out agency is really complicated. Like who, you know, is the medium, are you using the medium to tell your story or is the medium using you?

You know, like, are we kind of, it's sort of like, you know, I just think about a film like The Matrix where everyone's plugged into that sort of digital reality and they're kind of all just batteries and they're kind of, you know, and everybody's sort of blissfully just being used by the machine. And I wonder where we're at. And has the creation of this kind of third projected self What does that do? And then who owns that self? It's a really interesting question. And one that I would guess most people don't think about when we're just doing our thing on social media and things like that. We're just like, oh, I'm posting a picture or we're promoting a podcast or this or that. Most of the time, we're not thinking existentially. Oh, my gosh, what does this do to my sense of subjectivity and myself? But maybe we should be asking this question.

Chris Well, we'd have to find a simpler form of the question for all of us to be asking it, I think. So a lot to pick up there. Maybe it's just the last thing you said that most people are not thinking about this. But I would more turn it around and say, I think that we're all in some ways struggling with these questions of self right now. And interesting that you give You know, in your inimitable way, in kind of half a sentence, a couple thousand years of really interesting just history of thought. But yeah, to go back to Homer, to sort of the ancient Greek Stories of life and living and how there was no inward self. It was just sort of people were their actions. And we've sort of been on this journey since then of expanding, like discovering an inner self and then expanding that inner self. And if you think about it, one of the, I guess, just the... Chris Kutarna, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson.

And a lot of this book is about how, wow, nowadays people have so much more scope to make choices about who they are, about what their understanding of self is. And he was grappling with this back in 1979. I think there are a couple of great sentences. Maybe I can pick out one that I really like. He talked about how modernity entails a movement from fate to choice. And if you think about nowadays, things that 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 500 years ago were just taken as fate. You don't get to choose these things. You don't get to choose what your gender is. That's something that fate determines. Well, that's not true today. Now that is part of the definition of self. So there's this dramatic and ongoing expansion of who I am in an inward sense. And at the same time today, there is now this This dramatic expansion of who I am in a projected outward sense and all of the questions and issues that that entails. And there's some, I don't know, there's some ego, there's some me in the middle of those two giant projects. That it feels like they're very important projects because it's who am I? I mean, what's a more important question to me than that? And yet they're so impossibly big that I almost don't know where to begin. Another quote that I underlined in this book by Berger, he says, fate does not require reflection. The individual who is compelled to make choices, however, is also compelled to stop and think. The more choices, the more reflection. And I think that that too is a great summary of the challenge we face today. We have so many choices. That we need to reflect upon.

And one, we don't have the time, but two, we're not even aware of all of the choices that we are making as we are making them, which is sort of to the point that you were making about seven minutes before I started this latest diatribe. And so, yeah, who owns your story? It's become this huge, huge project that we each carry around. It must be crushing. Do you have any time to get anything done? You always want to say to people, just figuring out yourself is now such a massive project of life.

Scott It's interesting. I was in a clubhouse room the other day with It's interesting. It's a friend who I didn't know was on Clubhouse and had this group. He's a religious guy, has a kind of men's group that they just share their own emotional stuff. And I just participated. And the topic was like, it was, what do you fear? And so all these guys went around and shared what they fear. And I wound up sharing that I really feared that my life wasn't significant. You know, and when they asked me what significance would look like, it took me so long to tease that out. Whereas like, you know, if you were raised in, you know, Hungary in the 11th century or Naples or something in the 12th century, you're pretty much given a script about what a significant life would look like, right? Like if you're in a royal family, you have certain responsibilities.

Maybe you're the second son, like Luther. And you wind up going to be a monk. Like, I mean, you and I probably would have wound up in monasteries because we're reflective guys. And that's where academics went, right? They just shipped you to a monastery. And you read and debated. And if you were more about wine, women, and song, you were kind of, you know, there was a life of the medieval kind of peasant or shopkeeper. And there were pageants and there were ways to tell you how to have a meaningful life. And you just kind of, Again, I love Berger's title, The Heretical Imperative, and the idea is to be a heretic in the Middle Ages, or be a real free thinker and go out on your own, took a lot of work and a lot of guts because you could die for it. And now, unless you're a heretic, unless you're a free thinker, unless you're an iconoclast, we look at you as though your life is less significant.

And then the interesting thing is, which gets back to who owns the story, How do you become this author of your own story and develop this avatar? Social media, they're like power companies now. It's like having electricity or water. What business could you start? Or what religious organization could you start? Or what kind of nonprofit or think tank could you start without social media today? It would be impossible.

Chris If I could pick up on a thread of that, I'm going to make an inelegant segue, but listening to you describe this, I was suddenly thinking about this phenomenon of your social media profile. And if you look at people's profiles, You know, the tortured work that we do, that is done to try to craft a label for oneself that sort of captures that need to be an iconoclast that you described. You know, it's It's completely not done to be a manager or to be some... Some sort of plain vanilla title from the past. You need to craft something. You're a venture catalyst. You're like a breakthrough innovation wunderkind or something. You know what I'm talking about? Everybody's profile is... We're looking for that... That angle of distinction that kind of speaks to, I've got, you know, I've got a lens. I've got this essential note that needs to be added to the chorus.

Scott I have noticed this in a way that's almost nauseating. Thank you for having me. Consider doing this some more. So if you want to talk with us and be on the podcast, you could get on Clubhouse and we'll let you know when we're recording. But I've noticed, and I think this is probably because Clubhouse is kind of the cool kid social media right now, because it's invite only, it started iPhone users only, which iPhone folks tend to be a little more, you know, early adopter technology folks and stuff. Like, what you're saying about this sort of venture catalyst and stuff, I've seen that more in Clubhouse profiles than I've seen in any form of social media. I mean, it's unbelievable. And I've never heard these titles before. And I don't know, if you were at a cocktail party, it's just interesting because you would never say that to somebody at a cocktail party, right?

You'd never say, I'm a venture catalyst because people would think you were like, hi. But it's totally legitimate when you do it on social media. And in fact, without it, like you're saying, it's almost like you're just another cog in the machine.

Chris Exactly. No, you summarized it exactly. And I'm not to criticize it. I'm just to observe that there is such an imperative, such a value upon self-story. And a lot of the energy, obviously, if it's on a social media platform, is the projected self. You know, much more into Coming up to an appealing or enticing mask to wear for others to see, you know, rather than that project of kind of self-doubt and self-inquiry and self-discovery. And it's quite curious, actually, thinking about it, because, you know, in a marketing sense, If you're a company that is marketing and branding, you're looking for the most specific naming of the thing, right? That's the kind of the nirvana from a branding perspective, from a corporate branding perspective. You keep trying to, you've got thousands and thousands of words. And you're trying to land on that name and that tagline that simply and elegantly says the thing that is at the heart of your brand. So it's an intentionally reductive exercise.

And it's interesting that we've, you know, as we moved into social media and everybody is sort of their own brand, right, your brand, you, that we've transported all that has been learned about telling a story for, you know, a kind of consumer industry to telling our own story. Which, if you think about it that way, seems like a crazy thing to do. Actually, what we want to do is just the opposite. I don't want to reduce myself down. I want to be and recognize more and more of who and all that I am. So the project of the projected self and the project of the inner self, both these two giant projects that are underway are in some ways, for a lot of us probably, in complete opposition to each other. One is trying to get richer and more complex and more undefinable. Right? More of a totality that can't possibly be captured by anyone except my whole life project.

And on the other end, trying to like, you know, get it down to that tagline that they're like, oh yeah, Scott Jones, he's the da-da-da guy. So that everybody else can spread that trope and help you expand your persona.

Scott I signed up for this newsletter kind of thing because I do a lot of podcast production and stuff. And it was a guy that's actually from Philadelphia and has apparently had some success monetizing two podcasts. And so there's this free kind of master class type video and everything This class was about, this short video was about, was being reductive. Like, be as reductive as possible. You know, like, have this, like, you know, specific, like, basically podcast to millennial left-handed Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans or whatever. You know, like, it's these kind of, the absurdity, and you're right, it's, I was thinking, and there's probably something... Like I've been in the podcasting medium long enough to realize the truth to what he's saying, that there is probably something like, like you and I, what we do is probably a little less marketable because it tugs at this ancient, you know, pre-modern and current desire to unify things. I think we want, I mean, I think, you know, Aristotle said, right, we're rational animals. And so that's why he thought nature must be In some sense, you must be able to, through reason and sentiment and just, you know, the existential kind of digging through it, you must be able to make sense of reality, otherwise it wouldn't, you know, our purpose in it would be meaningless if we couldn't do that. But I think you hit the nail on the head of this, like, tension, right? It's almost like, I mean, one word for it would be schizophrenic, right?

Because our goals on one level, you're right. I think what most of us want is to know and be known in a community that makes sense of the world and knits together all of our different experiences. And yet everything in the world where we tell our stories in the Avatar sense pushes us to disintegration and to reductionism, which I just don't think that can be healthy long-term.

Chris I suppose. I mean, to just nuance it a bit, it's one of the ways of behaving online. And probably we're driven to be more specific about our public identity the more we're moving into a world of monetizing me. Right. So it's one thing if we're doing a podcast as a project of exploration and companionship and collaboration to You know, we're not quite sure what we're going to find, but we believe in the exploration of unfamiliar territory of ideas, and that's important to us. And so it's all right if it's hard to define, you know, what is the value proposition of exploring with us, of being a part of the Atlas Project? If this is our livelihood, if this is our business, then suddenly you're in a game of you've got to hit certain thresholds of audience size, and then you're in marketing mindset. All right, so who is our target audience? What are the things that they are interested in? What are the messages that speak to them? How do we sort of draw the Venn diagram between Our value proposition and their pain point. And then let's get better and better at hacking the language that connects to those people, makes them loyal. Like all of that. This is well established sort of how you do sort of...

You've seen it too on Clubhouse. There are people who are just there to experience conversation and just kind of add to their day a little taste of what it sort of is like to walk through the courtyard of a liberal arts college, let's say. And then there are people there who are going to try to make a living as a teacher or to stand on a soapbox. And there's probably a lot more So to move this forward to this question of who owns your story now. I guess the easy obvious example to draw on is a populist like Donald Trump, where once you get good at reducing yourself to a persona that attracts other people to you, Now those followers, they can take over ownership of you. And you find yourself, in terms of the next chapter of your story, what choices are you going to make? Are they your choices?

Or... Are they the choices that your audience expects in order for you to maintain that persona that you've given them, which has stripped away so much nuance that is inside you, but now it can't get out anymore? Which I think is really fascinating.

Scott It's interesting you talk about Trump because it You know, today it was just announced that there's this Facebook advisory board of like 20 people or something, and they voted to maintain the permanent Facebook ban on Trump. And I just thought when I read that a couple of hours ago, I thought, are these people working for Trump? Because it only sort of incentivizes like his brand, right? So it's interesting because When you think about ownership of stories, Trump is one of these people that's gotten so good at social media that he almost owns their story. And so now he's got his own platform from the desk of Donald Trump that it's going to blow up his own personal platform. It's fascinating the way power works. And you just heard a really interesting piece about power that I thought was really excellent. And we can link to it in the show notes. Which all of our listeners should read it. It's a really great piece. But this is how power works in the ownership of stories. Trump is a user of the platforms, but then he almost becomes his own platform. And now he has his own platform. It's just fascinating the way ownership of stories work, where Trump has been somebody that has, I think, kind of been...

The icon for this question in some sense, because he's really managed. But then again, at the same time, you could argue he has ownership of his story, and yet he's so dependent on his followers. A lot of Americans, myself included, think Trump had no affinity for the conservative movement before he ran for president, but that was the movement where he could get traction and stuff. And half the stuff He says at his rallies, I'm sure even he thinks are absurd, but now the Trump constituency kind of owns his story.

Chris And also his family's story. And the stories of many people who got into politics and then discovered that, in a sense, this is the story that empowers me. And that is the dialectic, right? I suppose what is remarkable today is if you can manage to tell your own story, and I'm not even sure what I mean by that, And that work for you. I'm not quite sure where to take that thread. But I think this is rolling back about half an hour where you said that. And now I'm kind of moving more to your point of view when you said that we're not even conscious of what is all happening in the arena of the self. And some of this stuff, the relationship we have with our audiences is a huge, huge dynamic in the development of the self. And it has been a major theme. In our lives over the past 20 years is now everyone has the capability. We're no longer in a mass media age where there were these gatekeepers to the ability to speak to many people. Everybody in theory has the capability to grow an audience. For many people, it becomes a question, well, should I? Shouldn't I?

And probably none of us... No one grapples with the question of what of myself will I lose when I succeed at building that audience. I suppose in the mass media age, this is what celebrities always talked about with one another, about how they've kind of... Now lost their sense of their ability to be who they were. I guess stereotypical examples, some Hollywood actor or actress becomes typecast. And then they decide, no, that's not who I am. I'm more than that role that you know me for. And then they have this kind of fateful decision around, am I going to be... Who the audience has been trained to believe I am, or am I going to challenge that by doing a role that kind of breaks me out of my type? I mean, is Tom Hanks ever going to do, you know, some kind of like he's the mad serial killer?

Probably not at this stage of his career because maybe he wouldn't be interested in, but even if he were, you know, it becomes this question of would Tom Hanks do that? And it's not a question that you're asking internally anymore. You're asking it of your public persona.

Scott Yeah. And also, I think there's a second layer to the question, right? Because I think you're right on where everybody's got to think about this. Like, what are the implications of how I'm telling my story? But also, I wonder the implications of people that create the mediums, the platforms where we tell our stories. And do you even know I have Clubhouse on the brain right now because I've spent a couple of weeks kind of intensely engaging it and it fascinates me. And the fact that they've turned down a $4 billion offer from Twitter means they must know something, that this is catching on. I mean, you and I are recording a podcast on this medium and we had a pretty good system before this. I mean, we didn't... The thing wasn't broke. I mean, we didn't need to fix it. And we're curious and kind of exploring. But I think about like Gutenberg, right, when he invented the printing press. He was a really pious, traditionalist Catholic.

And that invention was probably the biggest thing to undermine the Catholic Church in history, right? Because a couple of decades later, I mean, there were predecessors to Luther, like John Hus, and I think he was a Czech. They had a lot of Luther's ideas and got burned at the stake because there was no printing press. But Luther's 95 Theses went across Europe in like two weeks because of the printing press. And so you have this pious Catholic who creates this thing that basically births modernity, or at least is a midwife to modernity. Of course, I wouldn't say Luther's a modern, but it's a midwife to modernity. And Gutenberg, if you'd asked him, like, is this really what you want to do, what would he have said? You know, like, who owns the story of the printing press? Well, Protestants own that story. I mean, like, it was the quintessential Protestant tool. And Gutenberg had no conception of that. I just wonder, as people create these platforms by which and through which we tell our stories, Does anybody have any idea what they're doing?

Chris So if I can sort of build on that and explore another pathway. So far, we've kind of looked at the question of one of almost like the struggle to maintain a sense of self and to maintain a sense of ownership over the self. And in fact, the way the question is framed sort of implies That, you know, really, in a perfect world, you would own your story. And it kind of sucks that now there are these dynamics that means, like, in some ways, you don't. And you're, you know, you're especially, well, not especially, but, you know, for example, your future story is kind of not predetermined, but it's constrained, it's shaped by this digital avatar that exists of you This algorithmic understanding of the profile of Scott Jones that says, you know, I'm going to feed Scott Jones these kinds of contents because that's what gets him to engage in the platform in a way that creates revenue for the platform. And so that's what we're going to do. And then that becomes a raw material for the next chapter of you. Okay. So turn it around. You know, I guess it's also interesting to wonder at where is this going? This, you know, this sort of evolution of our sense of self, perhaps toward a more social understanding of the self. And is that not... A good development because our strong individuality always was a kind of A limitation to our understanding of what is real, of how we are connected, of how things like a pandemic give visible evidence to how wellbeing is more a function of we.

So there is this underlying reality where In which my individuality is a fiction, is a blindness, is sort of missing some other aspects that are also true. And so in thinking about it that way, does that not suggest that becoming far more social About my understanding of who is Chris Kutarna. It's not something that I just decide. It exists in relationship to all these other people I touch and how they understand me. That that is somehow maybe actually progress. That's closer to what's true. What do you think about that? Like letting go of the ownership rather than having it a power against me.

Scott I mean, this is where oftentimes like post-modernity often echoes pre-modernity, right? Because I think as we're talking about this and you were talking, the point you were just making triggered something in my mind. I was thinking, well, you know, it's just none of us ever have ownership of our own story, right? Because we're social beings in context. And so I just go back to medieval Europe because it's just the easiest thing for me to imagine. But I'm sure you're a China expert. I'm sure we could transfer this to China in the same time period or something. If you're in medieval England or something in the 11th century, well, basically, a combination of royalty and the Catholic Church owns your story. You know, the symbol structure and the possibilities for meaning, unless you're a Jew, and then which even there, I mean, like, you know, there are some exceptions for Jews in certain tolerant periods where you could actually have a distinctive story from the mainstream. But by and large, your story would still be owned by someone else, right? I mean, you would, you don't have, and with fewer choices, like Berger points out. But yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting is that what you're getting at is acquiescing to the communal dimension, right? We think we're individuals. Like, you know, if you're in medieval Europe, you don't have the illusion that you're an individual, right? I mean, that's just not... Right, it's impossible to... Yeah, you can't be an individual. It's just not on the menu, right?

What's interesting is when individualism is on the menu, but you realize it's not really nutritious and something that will sustain you, right? And so I think what you're saying is this move to a more communal sense of the story, but made from a position of self-awareness and acquiescence and acknowledgement, as opposed to You know, a kind of pre-modern context where basically you don't have that much agency or choice. I mean, the thing that is special about late-modernity or post-modernity, whatever you want to call it, is just the amount of personal freedom to define yourself that relative to the rest of world history, it's just unusual.

Chris So that's really interesting. And listening to you walk through that and thinking about how in a medieval context, My social self is far stronger and I'm fumbling toward an idea in my head, but I guess the word that's ringing in my head right now is community. How, you know, if who owns your story is a way of framing kind of the fight for which individuals, individuals versus their audience, where is the power to the question of identity, then, you know, almost how does the community help Me understand myself is another angle on the same question. And it seems to me that's an interesting one for us today because I'm not a medieval scholar, so I'm making up a lot of things in my head. But I feel like there, community does help you understand yourself, does help you kind of anchor yourself. But community was also quite anchored. In a physicality, in a literal group of people around me. And it was a sort of, in some ways, a diverse group because in order for the community to be healthy and functioning, you had to have different people doing different things. And so I understood myself in the context of that ecosystem.

Nowadays, communities are are you know often much more imaginary things and so you know i i remember i think this was i don't know if this is the first time we tried to record this conversation or the second time but i remember we had a conversation about tribes versus communities and i had had i guess it was about a month ago when when we did um a a virtual campfire Um, at Basecamp, um, with several people from around the world. And one of the women I was in a room with, Cassandra, was talking about the distinction she came to understand, um, between tribe and community. And, and tribe being people who, who think like me. And community being a richer diversity of people with whom I'm in a similar situation or we're in the same boat. But it's not as easy as they think like me. There's some differences there, but it's actually helpful. It helps me to more fully understand and explore myself. That there are different people and different roles in this thing called community. And so I wonder if maybe that's...

I don't know. I don't want to put too strong a point on it because it's very complex, but maybe that's sort of one of the... One of the weaknesses nowadays in terms of just, you know, as we struggle with questions of identity in a social media age, that we've blurred the distinction between tribe and community. And so The understanding of self that the tribe gives me is a kind of stunted understanding because there's just so much affirmation of what I've figured out so far that there's less impetus to explore the dissonance and figure out what that means to who I am and to how I understand myself. Does any of that make sense?

Scott Oh, absolutely. No, totally. I think it makes total sense. It's funny because my German is really terrible because I just took it for reading stuff in graduate school. But Weber talks about this, the great Dean of Sociology. He talks about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. And Gemeinschaft is more like the tribe, right? The basic translation is community and Gesellschaft is like society. Okay. And the Gemeinschaft, yeah, is more tribal, right? I mean, by nature, there are tighter bonds, but there's less complexity that's enabled by the Gemeinschaft, right? Because by nature, it's ties. I mean, Jonathan Haidt has written about this, the great moral psychologist. He said morality evolutionarily for human beings does two things. It binds and it blinds. It binds the tribe together, the Gemeinschaft together, the community together. But as you get to the society, the Gesellschaft level, you need more tolerance for dissonance and things because the thing just gets bigger. And you need ways to deal with dissonance, which the human brain hates dissonance. In an evolutionary sense, we just don't like dissonance because it stresses us out.

The hard thing is to just sit with dissonance, right? And the tribe is not going to let you generally, A, get to the point of dissonance, right? And if you get there, it's going to rush you out of it, right? Because too much dissonance and the tribe will dissolve. Where the society or the gazelle shaft, that kind of thing, almost by necessity, it evolves through dissonance. And that, I mean, I think you're absolutely right about that. I mean, I think that that is, you know, and you need, I mean, it's interesting because I think to be someone who sojourns in the society, right, or the bigger, more complex organism, you kind of need people to base camp with, right, around a campfire. You need people that will lend you courage to do it because it's just fighting human nature, right? Our nature is going to be to default into the tribe Because it gives us security.

Right. And it's interesting because ownership is really interesting because you know who owns the story in the tribe, right? The tribe owns the story in some sense, right? Binding and blinding is what actually makes the story possible, right? Your own articulation of the story in the context of the tribe. The hard thing is like who owns the... The story in the Gesellschaft, in the society, right? Because it's more complex, right?

Chris You know, I think if we had maybe like a mathematician in this conversation, I think this would be a good point to talk about fractals. Because it seems to me, you know, like fractals, the basic idea that there are these patterns that recur at different scales. So you kind of see a macro at a macro scale, you can see a pattern and at a micro scale, you can kind of see the same pattern. And, you know, this so this question of story, you know, as individuals. In a society, we feel like we are engaged in this project to self-narrate, to self-legislate, to find significance and meaning. And that whole project, it is happening within another story. Right? Like, so, at a society, like, you're part of an American story, and all of your efforts to self-author are going to be shaped by a larger narrative that you're in. Not the only larger narrative. There are many overlapping identities and stuff, but in some ways it's going to be different from somebody like me from Canada or like Xiaoli from China.

And so, you know, at that level, there is similarly this conversation of who's going to own the story of the 21st century, right? Is it going to be, you know, which civilization's project is going to prove to be, you know, the best project? And it's really interesting now In an age where community and storytelling can be so geographically diverse that That the layers between sort of the macro and the micro are now really starting to blur. So I remember, I guess it was last week I was in a conversation. It was actually a Clubhouse conversation. I like to float around some of the Asian conversations that are happening. And it was fascinating. There was this group of people and many people from mainland China, many people from Taiwan, having really interesting political conversations, but also very personal conversations about how policy decisions were being felt at a personal level. So I don't know if you follow Asian news much, but there have been a lot of Basically, belligerent flyovers of mainland Chinese military aircraft over Taiwan. Yeah, I have seen that. Right. And so it was so fascinating for someone from mainland China to ask. So how does that make you feel to someone in Taiwan? And having someone in Taiwan talk about the loss of personal security and the growing sense of personal anxiety that this government policy has made them feel is a kind of, if you think about it, a hyper-modern That people from two different political stories would have a personal exchange about how does a change in foreign policy make you feel?

It is a remarkable thing. Actually, I don't know how I'm going to connect this into the question that we're asking ourselves now, but I guess it relates to these questions of the community in which we anchor our understanding of who we are and to the possibility of a more social self that has a... I don't know. A greater innate awareness of how social the self really is. And I know, for example, you know, like national identity is one of those things that is profoundly personal. I mean, you say anything bad about Canada and I'm going to defend Canada because why? I mean, I'm not even in Canada. I haven't lived there for 20 years, but somehow I feel like it's a part of me. And that that might start to, you know, that we'll just have better, I don't know, experiences, more experience of weaving shared story about things as provocative as national identity. I mean, I don't want to be too optimistic about the kind of world peace, but it's fascinating that it's actually taking place.

Scott Then we have a next guest, Roy Field. Brown is here.

Chris All right. Dude, I'm going to have to go to bed soon.

Charles What up?

Chris There he is. Hey, Roy Field. Can I just ask, are you guys on this app all day? Only when Roy Field is.

Charles I only ever log on when Scott is, so, you know.

Chris Oh, it's like some kind of evil, yeah, there's got to be some kind of phrase for it, some like evil dialectic. I can't get out. I enjoy waking up in the morning and going for my run. And you two are inevitably in some small group conversation together. And I can tell it's got to be late for everybody in that room. Scott sounds like he's had a few drinks. Roy Field is still buttery smooth and dropping his comments in dulcet tones. But everyone else sounds like their voices are a bit hoarse. I imagine most of them are horizontal already and half of the people aren't responding because they've nodded off.

Charles I did that last night where I woke up and I was still in a room and I'd been asleep for seven hours. And there was me and two other people. That was the first time I'd actually done that. But also, because we're amongst friends here, you know, good, close friends. I think I kind of might have landed on Clubhouse yesterday. Like, I have like some clout on the app. I logged on yesterday to see there's a room named in my honor. I was like, fuck me.

Scott What is it called?

Charles It was called the Royfield and Arum Accountability Room because I met my first person from Clubhouse in real life. So Arum and I had drinks in San Francisco yesterday. We had a right royal time. And then people were somewhat aghast. Marseille Butler, The case in point that two of her posse had met up without running it by her first.

Chris So she told us that we need to account for exactly what we did. It's a big pyramid scheme. Yeah. Don't you realize that you invite people in and then you own them and all their followers? There's some dark cryptocurrency layer to the app.

Scott So Roy Field, you are right now on an episode of the Atlas Project. So we're recording our podcast. Thank you for having me. It's a big question, like who owns your content? Who owns the story of who you are revealing yourself to be? So who owns your story?

Charles Okay, like you dropped this one on me, but I think I can answer it and I think I have an analogy. So I am... Goodness, Scott, what was that?

Scott That was me just rubbing my hands together in anxious expectation of you answering. All right, cool.

Charles All right. Well, as long as it's anxious anticipation, I will continue. So I am a black Brummie from England in the United Kingdom, which is part of continental Europe. I have Jamaican parentage. My wider cultural affinities are Western in the classic kind of liberal sense etc etc right I could go on and on and on and I'm sufficiently aware that when I travel outside of my hometown my identity can confuse not always but it confuses quite often so when I'm wandering around here in California until I open my mouth People think I'm African American and then sometimes people do a double take when I start to speak with an English accent because to them They're not aware that a small but significant proportion of the British population is non-white. It's not something which is portrayed on TV too much. It's not something which is in the popular culture, though, yes, there's Idris Elba, blah, blah, blah. But in the general consciousness of the average American, black English people don't exist. Black British people don't exist. And I say this because I think it goes down to who owns your story. And I came to peace with this some time ago, that dependent on where I am in the world, people will be confused by me.

That I say to myself, 51% of my identity is how I frame it. That is my story. So I call myself black and English. I don't deny my Jamaican heritage, but when I go to Jamaica, trust me, they call me English. Because I don't think like a native-born Jamaican. My whole frame of reference for Jamaican society is actually through socialised English eyes. It doesn't matter whether I'm black or not. When I look at a Jamaican school, I compare my base norm to an English school. They don't have this or they do that. You know, they wear this uniform, etc. My base norm is English culture, full stop. So, but I understand that if I go to Greece, let's say, that that Greek person who's in Greece, and I don't know what the ethnic minority population of Greece is, but it's much less than the UK, that that Greek person, and that could be really well-meaning, will be confused by me calling myself English.

Now, I am English, but I understand where their confusion comes from. So I say this, who owns my story? 51% me, 49% it's in the eye of the beholder. And I think it's really kind of important to understand that. What I call myself still trumps what they think that I am, but I take it on board and I understand where it comes from. So when I mod a room, because we are on Clubhouse, Whatever I'm trying to do, and I've just come out of a superhero room where we talked about what superheroes mean to us, and there were some great testimonies delivered there. People talking about reading scientific terms and being able to take those into school and impress their teachers. People talking about just having a companion. You know, these superheroes were companions when they were kids reading comics because they grew up poor or grew up away from other kids, etc. What was I trying to do in that room? I'm just talking about my passion. Somebody else might take away something else from that room. This wasn't just Roy Field talking about his passion. This was Roy Field talking about what a certain bit of pop culture means to us in our formative years. What Roy Field did was to remind me of X.

So what they take away from what I was doing is almost as important and almost as valid as actually what I intended. So I see this through, I come at your question through the prism of my understanding my identity and how other people perceive it. But I think it stands also for your question as to who owns your story.

Scott Roy Field, that's really well said. And I feel like I connect. I've spoken about this in one of your rooms or maybe on the thing you had me on about identity. Because my father, I'm adopted. My birth father was Puerto Rican and my birth mother was Jewish. And I was raised in an Anglo working class home. My parents didn't go to college. And so, but I was raised in a majority kind of white town. And I often struggle with How to self-identify, right? It's always a messy kind of essay question, not a fill in an oval question for me. And yeah, so I feel, I mean, obviously I don't have the same story you do, but like, I just, I do feel the weight of not knowing, like how much privilege do I have? How much, Thank you for having me.

Charles Yeah, no, I don't have that issue in terms of seeding ownership. As I said, you know, I think it's a 51-49% thing. And I might be being generous with the 49%. But it's just to say that I still actually have ownership. I am whoever I want to be, right? That is my identity. That's how I, you know, when I get up in the morning and I go, right, you know, Roy Field, you get back to attack a new day. I go, right, this is who I am. Right. And no one can take that away from you. But we have to be aware That other people's opinions on us can be valid. They can also be wrong. You know, if somebody was to say to me, you know what, you can't be black and English, I will have a philosophical fight with them. But I appreciate, if they come at that with good faith, I can appreciate where they're coming at it from. You know, and I would talk about, well, who are the English? You know, it's the Angles, the Danes, the Jutes, the Saxons that came And classically, you're supposed to have pushed out the native peoples with the Celts, then the Vikings came along. That's the reason why we have Northern accents within England. That is the echo of the Vikings. Then we have the Norman French that come along, which then changed the language. And that's the reason why we have swine and pig. One of them is Anglo-Saxon, one of them is French. Subtitles by the Amara.org community That's the point.

So, the fact that since 1948 we've had non-white people in this country in significant numbers, you know, a minority but significant, somewhat to 13%, doesn't mean that I can't be English. You know, to be English isn't blood. It isn't blood, and even if it is blood, it redefines itself over generations. So fuck them, is what I say, right? But I appreciate if they come at the argument with good faith that they can legitimately be asking questions about identity. Now, totally legitimate, but the whole of human history... I then end by saying it's about emigration and migration. There's only white folks in North America because they emigrated there and they pushed out the native peoples. Oh my God, the native peoples, they crossed over the Bering Strait on the land bridge 20 centuries beforehand. They migrated from somewhere. So it's all about emigration and migration. And redefining what it

means to be something, part of a tribe. So I own that, I know what I am, but I appreciate that some people are always questioning it because there's nothing wrong with questioning, but I'm English, so I own my story.

Chris I just want to pick up on a couple of things that both of you said. One, I love this little beautiful gem of language and imagery you gave me, Scott. For me, it's less of a fill in the oval question and more of an essay question. I'm going to have to use that in some clever conversation in the next couple of days because I just love framing it that way. You think that's a fill in the oval question? That is an essay question. You're going to have to give me at least a thousand word limit to give you an adequate answer to that question.

Scott I'm applauding myself.

Chris Well, dear God, now we have sound effects?

Scott Yeah, that was the clubhouse sound effect clap.

Chris Oh, I've never used the sound effects. I'll have to go on. It's a whole Pandora's box there. But, you know, one thing that I found really interesting in what Roy Field, you described is... You sort of a couple of times mentioned your own sort of sense of self as something that's completed. You know, I wake up in the morning, I know who I am. And I think that's really interesting because, and we talked about this earlier in the episode, you know, you kind of think about what it is... To be alive in this modern moment, part of it is this vast expansion of the project of kind of self figuring out of who am I and things that once were fate are now questions of choice. And it seems like every day there's more work to do just to Make these choices about who we are. And then the other side of it is this massive expansion of the possibility of a projected self.

And, you know, you as someone who works in social media, you spend a lot of time, I imagine, you know, developing that projected self. And so is it, I guess what you've described sounds like a project that's completed, but I wonder if it's more dynamic than that. And how do you experience or, you know, do you have any thoughts on just, you know, the experience of, of the dynamic discovery of of both your inner and and projected self as as someone who you you you you i know you spend a lot of time in in in the projected world um and how does that all kind of feed into one project of understanding who roy field is

Charles So, I'm not complete. I'd be utterly arrogant to say that I'm complete. And just as I explained how the identity of the English has warped and changed over centuries, ditto us as human beings. We're not the same person that we were when we were three years old, let alone 13, 30 or 70. Our sense of ourselves can change over time and should do. It should evolve. We can't be static. Stasis is death in just about every organism. You've got to continually grow and evolve. So I do that. But I'm pretty confident in terms of who I am right now. But I'm also self-aware enough to know that at some point I will change. I will become something else. So I think that's pretty key. But in terms of the whole notion of projecting yourself, there's this often used word He was authentic. Donald Trump, incredibly authentic. He wasn't trying to hide it. You can look at a Mark Zuckerberg, let's say. He was a bona fide billionaire in the way that Donald Trump isn't. But Mark Zuckerberg presents as an everyman. Donald Trump is a key example of authenticity. And I think if you're operating in the media sphere, the social sphere, what's important is that you are your authentic self. Of course, it's only a sliver of the complexity that makes you up as an individual.

Yeah, that you can't go through, you can't be on this app and say, you know what, I had an argument with my wife, my girlfriend, my partner last night, and you know what, I hate the neighbor, he's a bitch, he's an idiot and whatever. That's not applicable, right? But you are yourself, you know, so who I project to be online is me, it's just not all of me. You've got to be authentic. Yeah, I wonder if there's a difference between being authentic and sincere.

Chris What might that difference be?

Scott Well, I don't know. I mean, I think authentic So first off, I don't even know if Trump was authentic or thought authentic, right? Like he projected authenticity, right?

Charles But that's it. We live in a media age where perception is all and people thought he was authentic, not honest, but authentic. And people voted for him in that regard.

Scott Because I think you could be sincere. I mean, you could be like, you could be sincere and really trying to be More value laden and intentional to sincerity.

Chris I guess, you know, it's interesting, you know, this word authenticity. Yeah. And I love that you brought the word into the conversation, Roy Field. It's a word we haven't used yet in like the three times that we've attempted to record this podcast episode. It's been a bit of a horror story because it is such a giant And sort of commonly used word when it comes to the subject of self-story and narrative and persona nowadays. I've never really stopped to examine it. That's why when you asked Scott the distinction, I honestly didn't have a thought on it. But I suppose... Do you ever wonder if there's something inauthentic about people claiming authenticity? You know, in the sense that is it when people occur to us as authentic, is that really what are we really saying? They seem confident in their Is that inauthentic or is that just authentically...

You know, who they are and what their current status of confidence and comfort with the social situation is, right? Like, it seems to me that we have a quite narrow band of when behavior, that person is authentic. I know I'm going down a rabbit hole now, but do you know what I'm saying? I wonder if we're using the word too selectively sometimes. I mean, I think I'm pretty inauthentic in some ways in that I really do, you know, I was raised to really kind of be tuned in to what other people and how I think other people are thinking and feeling. Rather than just putting out there how I'm thinking and feeling. And that's just kind of an orientation that I grew up with.

Charles But surely it's what you do with that thought and feeling though, isn't it? So if you walk into a room and you have your Chris antenna up and you go, right, this is the temperature of this room, these people think this, whatever this is, and that is diametrically opposed to what I think, And then you then go along with the group think of the room. But then that's inauthentic, isn't it? That's wrong. One of the things which I do on this app is I don't do it every day. So I'm not painting myself out to be some avenging, liberating angel of the left. But quite often, a couple of times a week, I will deliberately go into a conservative room and I'll listen to debate. Sometimes you learn stuff. And I'll get up on stage and then I will temper what I say so that they don't kick me off the stage straight away or that they don't misinterpret me. And it's one of the reasons why I enjoy this app because it's not Twitter. Where I've got to shout in 147 characters. I can talk about white supremacy in a room full of people that don't think that it exists. Think that America is a total meritocracy and if you just work hard you will succeed. What I don't do is walk into a room like that and say, I believe white supremacy is a thing and you're all bastards. Number one, I don't think they're all bastards.

I appreciate that I need to break down my argument sufficiently so they can agree with each minor step. And my great trick or thought experiment to use in this regard is to say affirmative action. Can anybody tell me what decade that came in to American political discourse? There's always one of two answers. People go, the 60s or the 70s? And I go, what do you mean? 1960s, 1970s? And they'll go, yes. And I go, no. Affirmative action was first practiced by the British Crown in America in the 1610s when it gave land grants to white men. That was affirmative action. But you think that is an entitlement. But when the governing system is then recognizing that people have been excluded historically from entitlements, you see that as affirmative action and you think that's wrong. That's where I get to. My second point is not actually to raise that. Then I'll go through historically and I'll come on to redlining and the GI Bill. And then I explain to them, can you see how weaponized language actually is? I say affirmative action. You think we're giving black people things which they don't really deserve. And you neglect when you've been given things because you see that as a norm. You're entitled to it.

If you go into a room and you start like that, you'll be amazed how people say, hmm, I've never thought about it like that before, Roy Field. Now, when I walk out of that room, I'm under no illusions that I've won them all over and they're all going to start voting Democrat. I wouldn't be so crass. But it gives them pause for thought. So going into a room and judging its temperature is a great skill, Chris. But it doesn't mean that you're inauthentic. It's what you do. This has been a long, long recording. Gentlemen, can I just quickly say I have a work call I need to make on Zoom in 10 seconds. So the fact that I've been on your podcast has given me great joy. Chris, I've been saying to Scott for the last week that he's a bastard and he ripped you away from my embrace two plus years ago. And I've never forgiven him for this. There's more of me to go around. I'm a renewable resource.

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have an open relationship.

Charles Well, listen, listen, gentlemen, I'm doing Mid-Atlantic tomorrow. I'd love to have you on that show, of course. We'd love to be on. On Clubhouse. But listen, I've got to go because my boss is now waiting for me on Zoom. But thank you for including me on your podcast.

Scott Thanks. Thanks, friends. And thanks to all the listeners for going through with this experiment with us. All right, Chris, I will talk to you soon.

Chris Scott, I really appreciated that. Let's talk soon.

Scott Okay, I just stopped recording. That was great. I'll stop too. That was fun.