SX: Power of Humanity - Gratitude and Gifting

[aschrijver]

This morning I posted on the Social experience design channel a HN submission of a guide to learn basic social skills. In the discussion various other such resources are named too…

• Basic Social Skills Guide - Improve Your Social Skills
• Succeed Socially - Guide to getting past social awkwardness

I should add here, and this is also reflected in a number of the HN comments, that I am in general wary of all the ways people suggest how you can deliberately learn or teach social skills. They are typically acquired by experience and being ‘out in the field’ as it were. And to deliberately ‘learn’ them walks a fine line of actually learning and becoming a more social person, or rather learning them to be wielded as tools, masks to wear, which makes one a less genuine person. A lot of “leadership” training and 95% of the field of Marketing are based on the manipulative side of Humanity and social skills, i.e. they wield virtues to feed into vices.

But I wanted to write down some notes on how this relates to SX, so here goes …

Intrinsic value of Humanity

The relationship with Social coding commons and SX, both intent to “reimagine social and imagine a peopleverse” starts with the intrinsic values of Humanity and Freedom (and in that order, humanity first, freedom second). Intrinsic values to be fostered and nourished throughout the evolving affiliation network form the lifeblood of a commons based value economy to organically emerge over time. All the aspects of Humanity carry value, and are powerful. Power which modern society - with its dehumanising hypercapitalist race engine - makes us forget and underappreciate. When considering them deeply, all these intricate facets of Humanity and Freedom become like currencies for value creation and exchange. Going much much further than economic systems only based on money, and seeing all the rest as external to the system.

Social skills can be said to constitute the ways and ability for us to express our Humanity to others. How does this factor into SX solution design then?

Example: Design for Gratitude

We can design software systems that encourage the acquisition and exercise of particular social skills. Take for instance the concept of "Gratitude", just one of the numerous ‘stocks’ in the broad Humanity ‘investment portfolio’. We understand gratitude, right? How it works and all that. Well… not so much, in practice. Especially in online contexts and in grassroots chaotic commons we don’t. We take the work others do for granted, take contributions and other value exchanges as a given, and it all-too-often this eventually leads to yet another Tragedy of the Commons.

Now, Gratitude is a very powerful currency, and we tend to forget that. People are willing to do a lot for other people with the only reward - the ‘payment’ - being gratitude alone. In our grassroots commons, for instance the FOSS and social impact movements, the majority of all the work and collaborative activities is done by volunteers. We also know that FOSS and doing community work is a “burnout factory” and sees people leaving disillusioned all of the time. Why is that? There is an imbalance in the value exchange that takes place. In general people are very bad at perceiving value as it is being excanged and this leads to ‘unbalanced budgets’ in the commons based value economy.

(Aside: There are very interesting social dynamics at play in FOSS projects, that I won’t delve into now. Among those are the privileged position that FOSS devs gain over time, and the unawareness of that privilege. Esp. where they consider themselves to create software for the benefit of “users”, a term that leads to othering of their audience, actual people, whereby the mere use of that term impacts how they perceive value. FOSS devs often regard contributions as expected, a gift as gratitude for the coding work they did. This may (and imho is) not be a proper way to perceive the value other people add to the project. Under SX contributions count as Gifts, a one-directional value exchange, that puts the recipient in ‘debt’, as it were.)

Gifting gratitude?

Showing due gratitude and appreciation are social skills. If we master these skills we carry a ‘wallet’ full of value to exchange with others. We can create this value at any time ourselves to add it to the value ‘supply chain’, and the care and attention we give to that determines the ‘denomination’ of this value. We don’t have to be rich and have money to get things done, when we know how to create value - wielding the power of Humanity - we can pay, in this case using Gratitude as our ‘currency’. We are our own ‘bank’ of Humanity.

One of the SX instrument sets I want to elaborate is named Gifting. Since we can easily create all these values of Humanity based on our social skills, we can participate in a Gift economy of sorts, and engage in gift exchange. While money and material goods play a role in the commons based value economy, Social coding commons takes the notion of gifting deep into the realms of immaterial goods.

(Note: I also won’t delve deeper into the mechanics of the Gifting SX instrument set at this point. TBD)

Technology can support people to wield their social skills appropriately, stimulate to practice and subsequently improve them, help acquire the skills in natural ways. One of the SX formula’s that Social coding commons pursues is called “Joyful creation”, and gifting, gratitude, appreciations are major factors to help increase the joy of collaborative activities and cocreation. Thus social experience design explicitly makes them part of solution design. It is not hard to imagine all kinds of UI/UX that help convey these human qualities and traits online, to have the desired rewarding effects that help stabilize the commons based value economy.

[travisfw]

I, too, have usually felt like I had to accept and participate in the “dehumanizing hypercapitalist race engine,” if I were to take my career seriously, and while the cult of productivity had me stressing most of my life away, it is not the only way to look at work.

To confirm and expand on your points, gratitude is a powerful currency, as you say, and if one steps into another’s life in service, even precluding any taxable compensation, one can see that value return in many ways.

Thinking of the systems in which we move, wondering how to pave a road down which could emerge a broadly more thrivable economy, I designed the concept of semantic currency, if I may plug my own bright idea. Semantic currency strictly eliminates quantitative valuation, enabling a bowl of oatmeal that saves a life to be subjectively valued above a luxury car no one needs. How much more valuable may not be quantified, but may be analyzed in terms of relative preference.

I have always hoped for a future economy where impactful work is always reciprocated. I don’t think the fiat quantitative economy necessarily needs to be torn down, but I do believe whole industries are poorly shoehorned into it, such as medicine and politics. Some industries, such as food, housing, and commodities, are scarcity-based and map well to the dominant quantitative model. Other industries, such as insurance and security, would probably be served best by a quantitative currency where the wealthiest accounts are zero or negative, but that’s a whole other topic. On the topic of joy, gratitude, and impact in work, I believe a model based on relative preference is useful to keep in mind when doing interaction design.

[aschrijver]

Thank you for posting this thoughtful follow-up. Really like your concept of semantic currency, reading through the hashtag’s history. The topic of this thread alludes to a deeper philosophy that underlies things. One that started very basic (it is founded on the quality of being Humble, another currency of Humanity) and grew in what you may consider a life philosophy aimed at leading a more evolutionary lifestyle. It is a guiding philosophy for the design of SX methodologies, and is called innercircles. At that link you’ll only find what I call the ‘eternal teaser’, because this philosophy has the interesting requirement that it should not need to be taught to spread itself. Instead it should be personally internalized by being merely exposed to it. That internalization in turn leads to awareness and realization of the true Power of Humanity, so one can wield it better.

@travisfw

Thinking of the systems in which we move, wondering how to pave a road down which could emerge a broadly more thrivable economy, I designed the concept of semantic currency , if I may plug my own bright idea. Semantic currency strictly eliminates quantitative valuation, enabling a bowl of oatmeal that saves a life to be subjectively valued above a luxury car no one needs. How much more valuable may not be quantified, but may be analyzed in terms of relative preference.

(I will CC @lynnfoster here, just fyi and to tickle the imagination in relation to Valueflows)

On a pragmatic level, musing on the implementation of the commons based value economy, I think that the values I’m talking about, when there are no direct monetary, material or immaterial exchanges involved i.e. where transactions are Humanity exchanges, are effectively expressed as semantic currencies.

On one hand it is great to have “doing business” as an analogy to inspire the design of the commons based value economy, because many of the mechanics of doing business are sound and well throught-out. Also they are intuitive to people used to living under capitalism all their life. The thought that there is value exchange are budgets to balance, etc. But in a software system giving that a UI with admin dashboards full of cold hard metrics would immediately see the whole Humanity aspect fall flat on its face. It would turn us greedy bean counters again.

I have many ideas on how the UX (or rather SX) of such systems may be realized. And it starts, similar to what you allude to as well, with making people aware of the value economy in the first place. As it already exists, and it works too. But based on hypercapitalist mechanics. Gaining insights and awareness on the much richer value aspects and service exchange that takes place, is the start. That part of the value economy has many software systems to take inspiration from, and to actual build stuff (on the social web as per SX).

Now suppose this software offers support for a person to manage a social graph with 1,000 people and 3rd-parties that constitute the value network where that person is able to satisfy their personal Needs. How would one keep track of the value exchange, if it is not with hard numbers? Well, it is more on the basis of how we intuitively value other people in daily life, offline, from the day we are born. We do value-based budget accounting all of the time.

If I help my neighbor from time to time over the years, receiving Gratitude each time, other currencies that build up budgets are Appreciation and Trust. This is felt “in the gut” by your neighbor, or better “in the heart”. If I come by one day asking to borrow a hammer, my neighbor is likely to say “Sure, here you are”. They became like an investor or bank of value. I don’t need to invest in a hammer, yet I can still use one to add value somewhere else. I became richer. A random stranger wouldn’t get the hammer to take home, when asking.

Overall the thought is to design on the basis of Humanity and Freedom, and building from virtues instead of vices. Creating software that stimulates and induces virtuous behavior. Hypercapitalism is effectively a vice-based system. Among others it leads to a distrust-first society, which is a great inhibitor for Humanity to thrive. Hypercapitalism lends unfair advantage to those who are willing to bend the rules, and walk the lines of acceptible behavior (or go beyond it). Sooo…

How would the SX/UX/UI be of ‘surfing’ that social graph, navigating the value network?

Here’s much interesting follow-up to give, but I will bite back to not make this reply even longer.
But here’s where Social coding commons kicks in…

@travisfw according to SX, specifically Hedonic peer production, there is a self-interest at work that intrinsically motivated you to post above. And your hashtag shows you are musing on the concept of ‘semantic currency’ for a longer time (months at least). You have more on your chest here, and specific Needs.

Now SX is a commons based methodology, meaning it is meant to scale to facilitate the commons. If I am the only proactive participant adding value to Social coding commons, then the value that aggregates over time will primarily reflect my own self-interests, which can only ever be the ultra humble 2 cents that one person has to offer in a society where billions of people shape life together. With 2 proactive participants that makes 2 + 2 cents, and even better SX is designed to make 2 + 2 = 5.

I invite you to elaborate more and explore together. At our own pace on the basis of SX Mindfulness principles, no expectations, no commitments (unless made with mutual understanding). I think that non-quantified economics and semantic currencies can become native concepts in SX methodology… Iff it is shaped that way through proactive participation and given that Social coding commons evolution is based on the resultant force and impact of its participants over time.

@travisfw

I have always hoped for a future economy where impactful work is always reciprocated.

On a deeper philosophical level here it gets more interesting still. I am not delving too deep here in giving examples. But when implementing systems on the basis of Humanity and Freedom as described above, given how fundamental these are, much deeper qualities and aspects of Life come to the surface.

Like for instance you mention “impactful work is always reciprocated” and I mentioned “imbalanced value exchange”. You are technically correct, but on this deeper level. Here we come to more ethereal things such as essence and meaning of life. And areas where wisdom and valuable life experience are gleaned or ‘earned’ in economic analogy. Like learning the value of being Magnanimous (which interestingly only has a very brief Wikipedia page) and not necessarily needing budgets with other people to be balanced.

If one can learn to be more magnanimous they acquired a “state of being” as it were, that allows them to pass through the challenges of life more easily. At least that is the assumption, that SX when it expands to consider this, will try to validate. Gifting is the SX instrument set where that exploration begins.