Katherine Druckman (1s):
Hi everyone Welcome back to Reality 2.0 I am Katherine. Druckman joining me as always is Doc Searls and today we have a special guest Barbara Cherry professor at Indiana university is joining us today and Doc, those are really well. So I'm going to let him do the formal introduction before we get going. I wanted to quickly remind everyone to please go sign up for our newsletter. You can find a link on our website Reality to cast.com and just click the Newsletter or subscribe link.

Barbara Cherry (40s):
Thanks.

Doc Searls (42s):
Well, thanks, Catherine. I have known a bar for a number of years and, and rely on her for having original and Absolut wisdom on things that have not heard from anybody else. And she is very much a polymath. She's a law, she's a lawyer and a law Professor, but she's also in the media department. I believe that I know her it through the Awesome workshop where I'm, I've been a, a, a, a visiting scholar for the last year before I get into it. Why don't you just tell us a little bit of what I missed and then we'll jump into what you and I were talking about earlier on as two, interesting to leave or to leave on that cutting room floor a this morning we meet. Yeah, it was just a few minutes ago. We were talking with them.

Doc Searls (1m 22s):
I took some notes, but it's because it's better to hear it from you.

Barbara Cherry (1m 25s):
Well, what we've been talking about M is looking at this particular period of time we have with the election and trying to understand what does it mean, or what brought us to this point. And I was sharing with, with Doc my perspective of some of the things that are in play and that I think what I refer to as systems thinking, thinking of things in terms of systems can be a very helpful way for us to try and comprehend what is going on, where history can tell us quite a bit, but also there's a lot of things we can't know, but systems thinking, understanding how humans behave and how we interact with all these systems. We've created these artificial systems, the economy, a governance, a political systems, and how this interplay is taking place.

Barbara Cherry (2m 13s):
And I think I have some, at least some perspective to share that might be of interest.

Doc Searls (2m 18s):
Yeah, you were talking about it as it was taking notes on it, where we were talking earlier that it's like, there were still these biological creatures that have created these complexes to tuitions. Some of which we Revere in our 200 years old. And for example, you said, the constitution never even comprehend at a party, a political party. And that's a huge part of the way it governance is run now. And then we created the technologies that alter us as well. I mean, we're digital beings now. We're not just physical ones. We were extended by our phones and by these other things that, or that are unlike anything we've had before. And that every generation seems to have been born into a million that gets obsolescence as, as technology forward.

Doc Searls (2m 60s):
And the institution is dragged behind. And even within them, you were talking about, and we can go into the network or directions here, how the, the three branches of the us government, the executive, the, the courts and 'em, and the legislative, all that, you know, they all move at different speeds in the past where they were like, I'm kind of meant to move at different speeds, but now everything is stripping are gears. So you can dive down any of those rat holes with like that.

Barbara Cherry (3m 26s):
Well, my own expertise, I'm a lawyer, but it also went back through my PhD and communication studies. So I'm trying to think as a lawyer, but also as a social scientist and the relatives have that is they ask for them to ask different questions. And my own expertise had been developing in governance structures under particularly is applied to communications technologies, to what degree should government be involved in or not involved in what the regulation of different communication's type systems and infrastructure. And in that vein I've function both as a lawyer for at and T in Ameritech, I have worked for the FCC in Washington, and I've also looked at these as a scholar. So I've studied is from different vantage points.

Barbara Cherry (4m 7s):
But the one thing that struck me that I hadn't studied as well or understood as well until more recently is really coming to terms with the fact that we've created all these systems, but what is the fundamental unit of analysis and all of this human beings, human beings, we make up these things. We make up these systems and orders in order to enable us to scale up our ability to live in much larger groups, compared to how our species first evolved to live in small groups in tribes and evolutionarily our bodies. Our biology has evolved to deal with small way to live in small groups. We did not evolutionarily evolve to live in large thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, and billions of people.

Barbara Cherry (4m 55s):
Instead we've had to structure institutions, develop fiction's or myths or principal's to help guide us too, give us something to focus on, to enable us to better be able to better live with such large numbers of people. That's impossible to get to know people individually because in small groups, you get to have repeated transactions with people. So you start to learn who to trust, not just trust. And instead, we have to create alternative ways of creating trust of which a great book called sapiens. A brief history of humankind by Yuval, Noah Harari is excellent and explaining it. And so I've become much more aware that biologically we have not evolved to live in these large scale systems that we've created, and we've created these systems as best we can at the time in which we create them, but we don't really understand necessarily how they interact with, by our biology.

Barbara Cherry (5m 57s):
And then as our species keeps evolving more technology over time or a change of technology, it also requires that our system's have to evolve. And so it just gets increasingly more complex over time. And so what I'm finding is that in order to better understand how we're living today requires that we go back and recapture a sense of history to realize that our biology is stuck in thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of years ago, but our institutions are trying to live with our very recent and even our own constitution is out of date. So in that vein, what I was explaining is there is another great book called a liberal democracy and the social acceleration of time written by William Sherman.

Barbara Cherry (6m 45s):
And he explains that are you, as a constitution, remember a was written over 200 years ago. And at that time it was considered a legal innovation as a political innovation or a brand new form of governance to try and to find a way for humans to scale up living in a group, a representative form of government without having to have some permanent monarchy based on some kind of basically like a caste system or, or you know, that your birth order and the system was purposely designed to try and prevent abuse of power to prevent the abusive power.

Barbara Cherry (7m 28s):
They felt that they had experienced from England. And so their idea was to create three branches of government at the federal level to which each branch of government was designed to make decisions in a different temporal context. So the Congress was supposed to be a very forward-looking creating prospective law. So you want that to be very deliberate and considered and not dumped to rapidly. The executive Brent was meant to be able to react more in present time, under current law, and to be available, to make decisions timely decisions for more day to day activity.

Barbara Cherry (8m 10s):
And then the judiciary was much more retroactive in perspective in that it's applying pre-existing law, two things that have happened in the past, for example, to determine whether something's has been violated or not. And his book does a great way to explain how the technology's we've had to develop the increased speed of transportation communications. We've sped up the way in which homosapiens live to such a degree that we're putting pressures on our own government. And then the United States, for example, are three branches. There are being each being pressured to react in a time context that they've worked designed to do.

Barbara Cherry (8m 50s):
We're asking Congress to pass laws with much greater frequency, to be able to respond much more urgently, which if they weren't designed to do with recent party polarization, the fact that we've got gridlock in Congress and that certain policy decisions are not being made by Congress is putting an increased pressure on the courts to make decisions in specific cases to address factual scenarios and circumstances, and how do apply pre-existing law to those nurser new circumstances when it might be preferable preferential for the Congress to make those decisions, and then to react more quickly. The president, you know, the executive branch is finding pressure to make more decisions in real-time and there is something else that you and I are well familiar of in the media field.

Barbara Cherry (9m 42s):
One of the results of Congress not be able to create laws fast enough to deal with rapid technological change is they have as a result of the industrial revolution, the late 19th century Congress created the first regulatory agency ever to regulate a specific industry, the interstate commerce commission to regulate railroads. And it was an express recognition that Congress could not possibly keep tabs on this industry with the attention that's needed. And they created a new form of governmental body called a regulatory administrative agency to which the statute created the agency, gave them all of these powers and said you monitor them. And that was a recognition also that judicial litigation through the courts where you depend on customers of corporations to Sue them in court, wasn't working cause these big corporations had to much in advantage in traditional litigation.

Barbara Cherry (10m 35s):
Well, that was a legal innovation. We have applied the same legal innovation now to regulate initially telephone Telegraph. We have the federal initially by the interstate commerce commission, we now have a federal communications commission. We've expanded their jurisdiction over time to include cable TV, commercial, mobile. And now that we have now, what do you do about internet service providers and the complexity of how we keep trying to evolve our governance systems to keep up with a change and technology? Is it a continual turn and how do we live with that? And then come back to the very fact that as you mentioned before, and you tell me when I'm going on too long, and there were parties comes in is that our whole constitution of an in and of itself was created before there were parties.

Barbara Cherry (11m 25s):
If you were to try and come up with a new constitution today, and that you would want to amend the constitution to prevent that kind of abuse of power by agencies. I mean, by the political parties, then when you want specifically to take new account, get a new form of a collective structure that's developed with our political parties. And what's happened in the last couple a hundred years is as a parties, political parties, they have emerged, they've have experimented and have found ways to aggregate power within our structure of the us constitution, within a, you know, in the federal government and federalism, where we share power between the federal and state governments, they have found ways to manipulate how things, how the machinery works under a constitution to advantage certain parties over others over time.

Barbara Cherry (12m 19s):
And that's where you can. Now. That's why we have now the potential for certain abuses of power that our forefathers didn't foresee, and that if we were really to try and deal with it, we would need to amend our governance structure. The recent confirmation, how recently confirmation of us Supreme court justices have been held this year is exemplary of that for us. So we can go into that if you wanted to, but it's just a manifestation, the gridlock in Congress, the fact that you have a Senate now where a majority leader will not bring certain votes to the floor, that's not in the constitution. The constitution doesn't go into sufficient detail to explain it.

Barbara Cherry (13m 1s):
It actually leaves two, both the house and the Senate, the ability to develop rules about how their chambers work. So it's only the way the party's have evolved in it decide to, to have a majority of minority leaders. None of those things are in the constitution. And the fact that even the filibusters is not in a constitution. So over time party's have changed the rules in their own chamber. They have resulted in different forms of gridlock or blocking the ability to develop compromises. So failing to call things to the floor. That's not in the constitution failing. They have this set to have a president or nominate a justice for you, a Supreme court, and for the Senate to not even grant a hearing, that's not in the constitution.

Barbara Cherry (13m 46s):
In fact, the first time that's ever happened or history was when McConnell and the Senate blocked, but Obama's nominee Merrick Garland. There is the ability on our constitution as written for a subsequent evolution of political parties to manipulate or experiment, to find ways of aggregating power to their advantage within that system. And that will persist unless we have a change in rules with whether it's a constitutional amendment itself or something, but that's what this current structure now enables. And the polarity polarization that we're in right now is taking advantage of that.

Katherine Druckman (14m 22s):
There's something that you mentioned earlier and, and that's, you know, the current structures that we have, you know, we, we, we had to evolve to regulate certain, certain technologies, you know, for the first being railroad or whatnot. And, and, you know, it brings me back to a question that we've had in previous episodes. And that is, you know, we just recently talked about, you know, section two 30 and And, and the desire to re-regulate social media and such and things like that. And, and it, my question is always with the S the technology moves at such an incredible speed that I, it's hard for me to fathom legislators, being able to keep up with it and correct me if I'm wrong. But I, my understanding is that we, what we ended up doing is applying existing laws that are, that are designed to work on a T telegraphs, for example, that Telegraph law and other telecommunications law, and then end up having to sort of be applied to things regarding the, the internet, which it doesn't make any sense, right?

Katherine Druckman (15m 20s):
Because we have not evolved as quickly enough. We have not reacted quickly enough to technology and the evolution of technology. So I just wonder, like how, how is it even possible for a legislative body to keep up with the pace at which technology moves as we go

Barbara Cherry (15m 39s):
On the way here, I can answer it. First of all, the phenomena of needing to create the phenomenon by which Congress created in a regulatory agency to pic to be able to respond more speedily. Then the legislature itself was a legal innovation in 18, 1887. And that itself reflects a really important development. And our society is during the 19th century industrial revolution, when we created, when new technologies were, were being created, that enabled human, certain human activities to be done on scale. Okay.

Barbara Cherry (16m 19s):
Particularly network technologies like railroads to Legg, graphy telephone, and then even the steam engine with lots of economies of scale for even steam presses for newspapers, the 19th century with the industrial revolution led to a growth in the number of corporations and their size. And in fact, we had to change the laws in the United States to enable corporation's, to be created more easily in order to accommodate the need for the corporate form, because the corporate form was needed to amass all of the capital that was needed to explain what these technologies used to be when this country was founded, that the only way a corporation could be created was a specific piece of legislation passed by state legislator, granting a special charter for a corporation to exist for a very specific purpose and innovation during the 19th century was the creation of what we call a general incorporation statutes in response to the industrial revolution.

Barbara Cherry (17m 23s):
And in order to make the corporate form more widely available for multiple uses in particular in business, these statutes were created and has led to the increase in the number of corporations. And those laws also allowed them to be in an ever larger scale with Special charters. That corporations were also limited in their size. The phenomenon is the 19th century result in this huge growth of humans scaling their activity commercially through corporations, and importantly through network technologies that have scaled their effect on the economy and with communications technologies like the telephone and Telegraph that effected not only commerce, but also our political system, because of the way in which we communicate.

Barbara Cherry (18m 11s):
So what's happened is during that whole, that was our first attempt to try and deal with how do we manage on scale with new technologies and how do we adjust our governance systems to deal with it? The first response was to create a new form of government entities, regulatory agencies, to take over that function and they can respond much more quickly. Now what's happened in the 20th century and particularly late 20th and early 21st, the speed of technological change keeps increasing. We're having a change of technology more rapidly than even the 19th century and the spin. It's not only the speed at which innovations are taking place, but the speed of the transactions that are being done through that technology through computers, which have been enabled by digital.

Barbara Cherry (19m 3s):
So everything has speeded up, not just the rate of technological change, the way we live our lives, the way we conduct commerce, the speed with which we can communicate with each other. And so this has had an enormous speeding, further speeding up function. Now, how does that relate back to the law? Here's one of the things that you will find if you study the law, which I have over centuries, and going back to some of the routes of the law you see in the United States, the most fundamental means of creating new law still as what we called the common law, we are a common law country. We inherited this from England and how the law was initially evolved over time, was through judge-made precedent, through the evolution of customs in norms and recognition by the courts.

Barbara Cherry (19m 54s):
And over time, as people are interacting with each other, and it can be the proximate cause of injury to other people. For example, when is that injury actionable in court, for which you're entitled to a remedy and through centuries of judge-made law, that's how the law evolved to deal with society as it changed during the industrial revolution 19th century, this led to the first speeding up of going from just relying on common law to having more legislative law or what we call statutory law by both Congress at the federal level and by States at the state level. So statutory education started to take over for common law evolution.

Barbara Cherry (20m 38s):
Then it turned out that even statutory education wasn't fast enough, particularly for certain industries like rail goes to these big corporations, railroads, telephone Telegraph. So they created a new kind of corporate, a new kind of government entity call a regulatory agency. So that was supposed to further speed up and to help keep up. Now we're finding, we're reaching the limit of even regulatory agencies being able to respond. So how do we ratchet up another nap, notch we don't know yet, are we gonna have to invent, you know, and other means by doing so and then goes, yeah, it's the final thing that fits into your piece of law? How do we keep up? Here's another thing, because we've gone from common law to speeding up creating new law through sex statutes.

Barbara Cherry (21m 20s):
This is another reason why increasing there are statutes have become more specific. If you look at an earlier point in time, statutes tend to be more general. Even the Sherman act of 1890, the very first antitrust act that you'd be surprised how short it is. Two quick provisions that are just basically saying no restraints and trade. And certain monopolization is wrong. What's happened over time is to statutes increasingly themselves have had to have had to become a more specific to keep dealing with more and more specific problems. Okay. So if you have a general law, how does that get interpreted by the courts and then maybe people do, or don't like what the courts have decided is.

Barbara Cherry (22m 3s):
So then you go back to the legislature and say, well, can we have a tweak to that law? And you'll see, this is where I cut my teeth in industry. When I worked for at and T and the eighties and in the nineties, my job was as a lawyer working in the States. And we had to increasingly go back to the legislature to keep revising the laws, to keep up with the latest things that were happening in the telephone business. And that was, we had competition with law a distance. And then what happened when you had local exchange competition? You know, the Metro fibers of the world, things like that, a phenomena of having increasingly increasingly more specific statutes and needing changes, fixes like that section two 30, section two 30 happened in the mid nineties, all in light of the most recent changes with internet.

Barbara Cherry (22m 53s):
Okay. And so we are living in a period where the need for increasing specificity in statutes or, and what do you enable another government, any like an agency to do. That's why agencies, many agencies are given rulemaking power to create new laws. They're essentially con legislatures delegate their legislative making power to the agencies. When they give them rulemaking power, you enable agency's to create rules that has the same effect of law. You give them the power to adjudicate things more like a specific complaint that they know more about than perhaps courts would. We've continually tried to innovate means by which to speed up how we can deal with it.

Barbara Cherry (23m 37s):
We can police or, and encourage the kind of behavior we want. And don't, and what kind of violations you give our legal remedies or not. This is relatively new in our experiences as a species. And the last, just like a a hundred to 150 years is trying to find a way to keep speeding up how we can get our governance systems to be able to settle disputes as we keep finding new ways to interact with each other, which includes technology. Is this making sense? Totally makes sense. Absolutely. Well, that's part of the problem where we're literally living in it. And the reason I go back to the 1887 interstate commerce act is that it's the first time that Congress, you go back to history.

Barbara Cherry (24m 20s):
The first time that Congress and the Senate set of a special select committee to study interstate commerce. And it produced a report known as the Cullum report, C U L L O M named after the Senator column that chaired that. And it goes on for hundreds of pages. And when you read it in real time, you see the world is they saw it and it all has to do with railroads at the time. But if everywhere, you just took out railroads and put in telecommunications, you would swear to God you're living in the same thing today. And what did they do? And what do you railroads and telecom telecommunications have in common are network infrastructure technologies that speed up communication. And there are common carriers under the common law.

Barbara Cherry (25m 1s):
We are reliving in many ways, just at a higher speed things that have already happened in the 19th century. But through deregulation, we have gotten rid of some of the, we have dismantled some of the laws that were put in place to deal with those problems. And that's what <inaudible> is about. We've actually undone some of the laws that were put in place to specifically deal with the problems they had in the 19th century, and they are getting repeated now. So really behooves us to look at history always. Yes, I agree. We need to increasingly specify. I don't see any way out of it. There has to be some mechanism to continually settle disputes and deal with the ways in which humans interact, both for good and for bad.

Barbara Cherry (25m 42s):
And if there are certain kinds of behaviors and affects that we want for our society, we have to have a means by which to say this kind of outcome is okay, this kind of outcome has not. And we may have to keep adjusting and redrawing the lines in a slightly different ways as we learn more as the technology changes, or as we learn more about the impact of the technology. And I don't see any way around that. It's just that we might have to get more creative about the mechanisms we use to do that in administrative regulatory agencies was an innovation in the late 19th century to start that process. Can we improve upon that? That's one of the things we should be looking at.

Katherine Druckman (26m 21s):
You know, I wonder a couple of things. One of them is I wonder it would be being a bit of a techno rebel. I wonder if I, if I enjoy the fact that technology maybe moves faster than let's say railroad technology or early or telecommunications today, internet technologies are moving at a pretty rapid clip. And, you know, maybe I enjoy the fact that they outpace our to regulate or legislate them. And that's, that's one thing that I had. And the other thought I had was, you know, the idea that, that we have To sort of shape behaviors That are desirable and undesirable. And I wonder how in the world we do that today being so politically divided. And I wonder if you had any thoughts with that or Doc, you know,

Barbara Cherry (27m 3s):
Yeah. Well, that's where I struggle with. It's an in doubt, the problem is it's an endogenous variable. The very Technology that's an Emily is also a key one could argue, is contributing to the polarization because it enables tribalism. And another way it enables, like even what we call what's fake news to, what's not, what's back to, what's not, it's harder for us as humans to even decipher we've created it for this one. They have learned in looking at history of technology, every technology or species creates has what we might perceive as, you know, the beneficial effects, but also they have effects that are not considered as beneficial.

Barbara Cherry (27m 49s):
Sometimes the benefits of a visual effects might be for the collective as a whole, but have some real negative effects on individuals. And that could change over time. And sometimes people find, however, well-intentioned a technology might be invented for, as you talk to some of the people who are considered the founders of the internet in terms of technology, they did not foresee some of the uses that it's been put to now. And so this is one of the things that we have to constantly come to terms with, with our species is that our species is a very creative and the systems we keep creating can be used for multipurposes. And the means by which a society try to be collectively change the rules of the game is indogenous with the technology that we use to organize ourselves.

Barbara Cherry (28m 40s):
So that's what can make it very difficult and from a political. And then I'm with doctors who are referred to earlier to being a polymath, but this is where you need to be interdisciplinary to tuck people. And this is where I a, when you go to the political scientists, but they often find, unfortunately his, sometimes the major governance changes you need require a crisis. Sometimes it takes a crisis on scale to get a system to change something. Unfortunately might have to go really wrong before you can Jostle the system to rearrange itself in such a way that they finally can invoke the change that's needed. All right.

Katherine Druckman (29m 15s):
And unintended consequences. And I think my most frequently used the phrase on this podcast yes. And unintended to me,

Barbara Cherry (29m 21s):
And that perspective as a crisis. And in other words, sometimes the average or negative affect has to reach such threshold, right? So that you can Jostle in essentially the status quo most efficiently, that you can get a change in the system, but it was okay,

Katherine Druckman (29m 37s):
Let me go ahead. Why don't you just really quickly, I promise this time

Barbara Cherry (29m 42s):
To do our legislators have that interdisciplinary background that you mentioned though, and, and are, and do they have, I mean, they, they, and obviously every legislator or can pull in experts from all fields, but that has that, I guess, that's that I can leave it at that. That's a well known

Doc Searls (29m 58s):
To me before you mentioned that I wanted to, I want to go somewhere. That totally is down the line of that with Katherine is taking you because you may have been there when a small group of us met to talk about net neutrality with a former FCC chairman. I won't name And at a gathering that were at, and he said something that has stuck with me ever since he said, I've met with every member of Congress. And there are two things that are almost none of them understand. One is technology and the other is economics now. Good luck. So at that sort of as a way of framing it up, you know, where you might go with this, cause I,

Barbara Cherry (30m 38s):
This is where I can share some experience or at least from having been involved in policy making since the early eighties. Yes. It's not necessarily that every individual legislator has to be interdisciplinary. You have to have a set of circumstances, such that the system can function and enable interdisciplinary thinking. So let me give you an example, when I early on working for, at and T I was in the government affairs group and I represented at, and T's interests working with lobbyists negotiating legislation in various States.

Barbara Cherry (31m 19s):
And the political environment was such a in the United States at that time that you had enough moderates in both Republican and democratic parties, that it was possible to get people in the room representing different interests, to discuss and talk about these things and to a reach, a compromise what I would call a well-considered compromise that reflected a true blend of the different interests. And then that could be, and the legislators in their staff would enable these discussions to take place.

Barbara Cherry (32m 5s):
And then we could help develop language, joint language. Like this is when a lot of the rewrites were done of the public utility law's in the States. Okay. I had a hand in rewriting, quite a few of us statutes in the Midwest. We can truly get language draft language to go into a bill that would be then sponsored by state legislators. And it would reflect the input of people from these different interests. And you can get enough, you can get sponsors from both parties, you can get it through the machinery so that you can actually get bills passed that genuinely reflected in interdisciplinary, inter stakeholder perspective, the environment, the political environment at the time enabled that to happen.

Barbara Cherry (32m 58s):
And so that's what you need. You need a institutional governance system that accommodates in how it functions, the ability of the exchange of views. And that's what we've lost now, in part, some might argue that part of it to do, to change in rules within the parties themselves, where the way it means by which that running for office becomes more of a fight during the primary. Okay. So the fight during the primary lead to more extreme views for that party's representative and that over time that contributed to having legislators with more extreme views, the party apparatus itself.

Barbara Cherry (33m 49s):
And I've talked to the number of politicians who have been around for quite a while. So we've talked about how the parties, how they've handled their own structure of candidates. And primary says itself changed the system. Also the fact that some also political scientists date, some of the increased hostility to around the Gingrich period of time, that in the big scope of time, sort of that what's considered the bi-partisan era that I live through early on in my career is deemed to have been coming to an end in the mid nineties, primarily around the time that ne Gingrich came to prominence.

Barbara Cherry (34m 32s):
And he was advocating a different means of doing business as we've seen. And this is contributed to the dynamic also happening that within the Republican party, there's a certain of, again, increasingly a way from bipartisan reaching compromises, it's all for broke kind of thing. So you have to look over this big scope of time. What I see is that it's a succession of things that have happened over time, and then the infusion of dark money by a lot of the money to people into academia itself, by my being an academia. Now, as I used since 2006, how much it's affected, how scholars get funding or not, and how there's been an increased funneling of funding to get certain outcomes.

Barbara Cherry (35m 25s):
And that was compromised. Some of the things in academia, we've had a series of developments, particularly the last couple of decades that is contributed to the increase in the polarization, and then the manufacturer of arguments and a scholarship to support. The more extreme views you have to look at. These things is multilayered. And it's the cumulative effect of all of these that have led to on balance and are in an environment where we had this polarization. But I have been a part of policymaking processes. When you didn't have that degree of polarization, you didn't have that kind of hostility. You really could get more well-reasoned multi-stakeholder input.

Barbara Cherry (36m 9s):
And I feel bad for people, young people coming up now because they haven't experienced it, that they didn't even know what's possible. So this is where we are. And then you're talking about complex systems, and this is the mother of all things that really spurred my thinking. The most is becoming aware of the complex systems perspective. The whole thing that certain systems are so complex that you can't understand their behavior by just reducing they're into parts. You can't, you can't reduce a understanding system and the parts and say, Oh, because you have these parts of ABC is going to operate a certain way, complex systems. You only know if they're going to behave by watching them by living them and observing them. And this was part of what were saying, we are living in the experiment right now within an experiment.

Barbara Cherry (36m 52s):
The us constitution itself was considered an experiment and political governance. And even within the constitution, we are living through an experimental period because of the pace because of our particular combination of circumstances. And so nobody can tell you for sure, what is going to happen,

Doc Searls (37m 10s):
Can a fully tribalized system survive. I mean, I'm thinking of Lincoln and at a house divided against itself, cannot stand. We have that now. And it's an effect. There's a, there is a heuristic that Marshall and Eric McLuhan came up with where you look at everything in terms of a new media doing for a new technology doing for things that re it enhances, won it, retrieves won it obsolesces one. And then it reverses

Barbara Cherry (37m 38s):
In a way I've seen you use that. Yeah. Yeah. And

Doc Searls (37m 40s):
What was it? And I was thinking with, with social media, just social media alone, it clearly enhance it makes us more social. It, it either retrieves or enhances gossip. I mean, to have a monstrous degree, you haven't got it. You want gossip. There is nothing better than Facebook or Twitter for gossip, right? We are, which is Yuval Harari in sapiens, which was sourced earlier. It says, well, it was certainly part of the way our tribes worked in the first place. I mean, you have a tribe of 20 people, you know, who the good ones are getting berries that are Goodwins for making tools. They're the ones that are known to do a cave art or whatever else it is or where the beast live, or, I mean, who knows what it was, but we, we needed that in order to know each other, but generally we knew each other fairly well.

Doc Searls (38m 24s):
And humans are interesting and a sense that we are all designed to look and sound different on purpose. So it, can you tell each other apart, and We, we all have very unique soles. I mean, we are very different and which just makes it even more vexing, but then it we've retrieved every medium. There is, you know, for social media, like right now, I mean, right now we have retrieving radio and we've obsolescent radio that used towers and transmitters. It said that's ancient history at this point. But as he reversed in the tribalism and, and it to tribes, I mean, actual tribes, you know, watching the news, going back and forth between Fox news and CNN MSNBC, these are different worlds.

Doc Searls (39m 5s):
I mean, and they're doing things that humans have always done, which just tells stories. And there are stories. They have a hero, their hero is Trump and, and the other side is a hero. And that's Biden at least at the moment. And all of the stories are about how this one is victimized. It was doing that thing with her, whether things are true or not as almost a secondary consideration it's or, or below that it doesn't have to be if it serves the story and what are the best stories there fiction, right. And we can all get to write fiction. He does that, make it up on the fly and it, and if it's in character that works right, of course they are cheating. They ha they have to, that's what they do. And that's the only way I'm ever going to lose is if somebody cheats and just speaking personally, I have no idea what to do with that.

Doc Searls (39m 48s):
And I'm hoping you don't want to get too far into the Politics of it, but I'm hoping that if I have no hope that if Trump wins that this will never happen, but I have some hope that if Biden wins, we have somebody who, I mean, will have a president who has been a 47 year 47 moving point average of every democratic policy to has been including all the compromises. So that's not a bad thing. I mean, and especially in the along that line of the ideals you've been talking about, which is, can we, can we at least talk to each other guys? You know, so, and I'm wondering about that. I I'm wondering whether the, most of the thinking about, you know, in, in George lay distinctions between what he called the strict father model and a nurturing parent model, but saying the nurturing parent model is one that actually gets more done.

Doc Searls (40m 35s):
Whereas a strict father model is basically wants the dominate and when, cause the other's losers and moves on that will, you know, by having somebody on top of that, at least to trying to care for it. But other people, we were, we might have a better chance of getting somewhere. But I don't know. I mean, I just don't know,

Barbara Cherry (40m 50s):
As you're speaking, I, I'm referring to, I take copious notes. I read something that I think is great. And the sapiens book, we've talked about an important thing that the author emphasizes is that when we stumbled on agriculture as a species that enabled us to live in groups in a much larger scale. So he emphasizes that we did not have enough time to allow an instinct for mass co-operation to evolve. So instead sapiens evented myths to provide the needed social links, to build networks of mass cooperation.

Barbara Cherry (41m 30s):
And so basically our networks are all based on imagined orders or myths, shared myths. And one example of that, for example, he cites it like a declaration of independence, you know?

Doc Searls (41m 45s):
Right. And that there is such a thing as, right. So you said we made that one up too.

Barbara Cherry (41m 49s):
And so basically he was saying that he believes that functionally imagined orders are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. And what's happening is we have a war of myths going on now, what do you have certain myths? We have a certain order. The constitution itself reflects certain MIS or orders, right. That we bought into as a country. But how have we tried to live with in it, it required continual amendment like dealing with slavery, things like that. It keeps them sending over time. We're through another period now where we've got a challenge of alternate myths now, and technology can make it more possible or certain myths to get this distributed, write with greater ease than they might otherwise.

Barbara Cherry (42m 43s):
And so one could argue when you look at it from the perspective, the big macro long-term horizon likes the sapiens book does that were going through another iteration of trying to figure out what are the myths that are going to prevail? What's the imagined order that's going to prevail for mass co-operation. Now we have a structure of governance based on certain myths in the us constitution. Now, will that hold or can it continue to be modified or is there ultimately going to be such a serious rupture to that, that we have to start something else. Now what happened?

Barbara Cherry (43m 24s):
The American revolution from Britain was a rupture to establish a new order. And sometimes we forget, unless we remember our civics, that the first attempt of the United States to develop a governance system with its articles of Confederation, that it was the first constitution within a decade. They said living underneath the And within that was anarchy thats using their words that the federal government was so weak in interstate commerce. It was impossible to live under, which is why they call it for a constitutional convention. They got Washington to preside over it because they knew he was so important as a leading person to get people, to buy in, to having like a constitutional convention.

Barbara Cherry (44m 7s):
And that's what ultimately led to the us constitution. Now at different times, you know, we've had our own tests with a civil war and the civil war resulted in some further amendments to the constitution, but we, you know, the threat to the unity of the country was seriously threatened them. And so the question always to what degree can you continue to manage change? Can you manage the contest of myths? Each of which reflects the incentives have different groups. And then we have a faction now that has a lot of vested in creating a myth of fraud and elections and so on, so forth, how far will that carry?

Barbara Cherry (44m 53s):
And now you got taken the kind of, we have a new technology now that enables certain myths to be transmitted. And retransmitted write with ease that might enable those myths to scale at a level to compete with the pre-existing myths. Right. And that's one thing that we're living through and a political polarization is both its indogenous it's both contribute to and is a feedback loop in both countries

Doc Searls (45m 24s):
And it's multiple feedback loops. Yeah. So I'm wondering if I was thinking of it as you're reminding us of the, of the civil war. I mean, they're, they're they're we had to do, you know, a, a, a split between that that was a geographical split, but it was also a split of, in a number of other costs, but because it's so sad on geography when we could have a civil war where people went to war on over territory, as it, as it were here in the virtual world, we can build up enormous divisions, but it hurts me. They are geographical as well. And it's just as an eye, never write anything about Politics for the UN on Facebook, because I know I'll get the immediately profiled and put it into one of those camps.

Doc Searls (46m 9s):
So I wrote as an experiment a couple of days ago, this one liner, which is like a piece of poetry is not meant to be too literal. I said, geographically speaking, the us is a red country with blue spots and naturally enormous arguments followed. None of which are kind of riffed on almost none of them. Some of them did what he was looking for. It was like, okay, this is interesting. You put it that way. Let's look at that. No it was, I mean, that's the kind of thing as a teacher, I would say to a class write, you know, I mean, I am interested by that and look at the map of Pennsylvania. Right.

Doc Searls (46m 49s):
Well, and I'm thinking of where you live. I mean, you're in Indiana, right. And I mean, Bloomington is a blue spot on a red map for the most part. Right. And, and when we were last there, we drove to M to Kenyon college in Ohio and in Knox County there and a little East of there you're getting toward Hillier country. And there were signs everywhere that said in big red letters, God guns, Cole, Trump. Right. A lot of them the, and that was like, Oh, and I thought, wow, but that's, that's the nut, there's a narrative there that connects those dots. And you know, but at the same time, I mean, to me, it's not a very motivating slogan to build back better actually, you know, from Biden said something that was inherently constructive, I would think.

Doc Searls (47m 42s):
But I really do think that there's a, there's this weird urban and rural divide right now that the Petros has done on this show, but it is usually on our show up on Slack we were talking, you said that, you know, you, when you drove from Chicago to Kentucky or just some place to see relatives and your scan on a radio, the only thing you're hearing is the world, according to Trump, you know, and, and, and defensive, it's an explanation of it and go where it's taking on faith, that Democrats are really freaking evil. I mean, they are, you know, I don't know if you've seen into a bar at a movie, but you know, there is a lot of my life, I suggest saying it it's, it's, it's torture if you don't like seeing people made uncomfortable, but it's brilliantly done.

Doc Searls (48m 28s):
No, but at one point he is kind of spoofing. He was, he was hanging out with a couple of Trump fans who are helping him out. He was playing this guy from another country and they're helping them out. And you said that, you know, you know, what's worse, you know, and I don't know if this is some cereal killer or Democrats. Oh, you know, Democrats write, you know, that that's and it's,

Barbara Cherry (48m 49s):
We have a number of different divides. One is the graphical. Yeah. You have a different one, depending upon which issue you wanna raise, some are gender or ethnic, you know, or are you talking about now, if you were talking about just put political party affiliation, here's something I would really suggest. And I picked this up because I just bought a book, have a chance to read it again.

Doc Searls (49m 19s):
If the people that have been listening to this, I know, I feel like in order of trade being carried around, well, I was walking with her laptop. Okay. It just pick out a book.

Barbara Cherry (49m 31s):
I've had a number of previous books by John Dean and about the four Tarion personality. And I was worried a lot in political science. This is empirically based learning that there is certain personality types that tend to are highly correlated with a certain political positions. And he just came out and he refers to research of, of a man on the person on the, on the floor of 10 personality, Bob Altmeyer. And they just published a book called authoritarian nightmare, colon Trump and his followers by John Dean and Bob Ultima or where they are looking into, how are we can better understand why some people align, tend to be aligned politically with certain groups based on a personality or based on this authoritarian personality type.

Barbara Cherry (50m 34s):
So now that's going to cut across, that's not going to fit a specific just region or race or sex or whatever. So it's multifactorial trying to determine why people align the way they do. But the authoritarian on I'd have to refresh my recollection of this to speak more cogently about it. But the, just the, just the, the idea of as best of my recollection is the authoritarian personality has to do with how you react to power, where you want power to be a, I can't remember exactly, but I don't want it. I don't want to mess up explaining to him, but certain people of God I'd like to refresh my recollection before I talked about this.

Barbara Cherry (51m 22s):
But there was an empirical evidence that shows a white people tend to follow authoritarian leaders versus others. And there's a certain kind of questionnaire that's been developed and been tested for decades now. And there's a very high correlation with people who perceive the world a certain way and how they come to a line, therefore with certain leaders in one way versus another. And that I want to read to get a better handle on what that I think Michael, better towards trying to explain what the mindset is of somebody who has a Trump followers.

Katherine Druckman (51m 59s):
There was another book it's on my list. And I don't know, I'm probably going to have to cut this out because I won't find the title, but it's, it's a similar study about conspiracy theories. It's a, it's trying to define what type of person adheres to a conspiracy theory is. And you know, and what has led to the proliferation of conspiracy theories. And of course, I can't find a title anyway, but, but it's a similar idea. And you know,

Barbara Cherry (52m 23s):
I'm sorry to interrupt you. You talked about like, some people are social dominators, others are authoritarian followers, things like that. There's different personality types in a certain types of people who tend to follow people who want to be socially dominant. I'm sorry. Anyway, but he didn't even know. That's interesting. You get the gist of it. And I think we need to think more in these terms, we have to understand better how people behave, how they're wired, how do they respond to things? And sorry, I should have been arrested. No, that's good.

Katherine Druckman (52m 50s):
They hate it. You know, we, we, we put links in with every episode and we can link to the, to the book, to this book's yeah. Oh, a fantasy land. That's the book that I was thinking of. Have you read it?

Barbara Cherry (53m 2s):
I've heard of it, but I haven't. I've got a stack of about 30 bucks. I want to read I'm in a time to read them.

Doc Searls (53m 6s):
I have been to a fantasy land at Disneyland, actually different from back when I was there. I don't know if that's still there or not. It was 60 years ago, but it was a kid. It was still there. Oh my gosh. So is Zane up to fetch? Who's a, a columnist in many places in a former colleague at the Berkman Klein, Reese who writes very eloquently about a lot of this. And she should just put out a newsletter today that said, you know, well, if we lose Donald Trump, that doesn't mean what made him attractive is going away. And if we could easily get an authoritarian who actually is not, not a liar, not, not does has none of the things that we dislike in Trump and, but is still the authoritarian, you know, who would ever, but anyway, it's it, it's, it's a little bit of a scary thought because I think there is something in human nature that wants to follow a leader.

Doc Searls (53m 58s):
I don't think Trump gets any credit for on the other side, if he gets very, a little credit for being a real leader, he has, he is a leader and he led those people. People go to that rally because you know, they like that guy and, and he leads them and then they cheer for him. But that, that would never happen with Biden. Okay. You know, it just real quickly, you might find a way to go for it, go for it.

Barbara Cherry (54m 24s):
So one of the chapters in this new book is about our authoritary explain what a authoritarian followers are. And they're using this in the context, explain a lot of Trump's supporters, authoritarian followers show these three characteristics, one, a high degree of submission to the perceived, establish a legitimate authorities in society to high levels of aggression in the name of those authorities. And three, a high level of conventionalism in sitting. There are others follow the norms of endorsed by they're authorities and

Doc Searls (55m 1s):
Necessarily, you know what

Barbara Cherry (55m 2s):
That is because these followers submit to what they consider these established legitimate authorities they're called. And this is not in a political, is that called right-wing authoritarians, but right. Ring here does not mean conservativism. It's referring to a degree to which they follow. But anyway, it's the whole idea at the gist of it is that there's certain people have the psychological have traits of being authoritarian followers and others have been authoritarian. Social dominators. Trump is viewed as a social, a dominator and people who followed him are in this context for us on this scale or consider followers.

Barbara Cherry (55m 44s):
And so that can happen in bearing demographic groups.

Doc Searls (55m 49s):
It's interesting. I mean,

Barbara Cherry (55m 51s):
It's just another piece of the puzzles. What I'm saying, this is interesting to handle on. There is a lot of factors in play and that's another way to look at it,

Doc Searls (55m 60s):
Right? Yeah. I think there's, you know, we've been at this for an hour or so. Right. So I want to just change the subject to something that we can live in or take out because we can edit, this has nothing to do with politics. It has a lot to do with, with you Barbara and yes. And that's horses. Oh, you're into horses. And. And so the question I ask is what, as somebody who has this horse's is into horses, what can they teach us?

Barbara Cherry (56m 27s):
Oh, God. So much. I found that I gravitated towards horses from a young, very young age, but my father said, Oh, well, all the little girls to say that you'll outgrow it. So I didn't actually get my own horse until I was in an adult. And it was like a graduation present to myself after a while

Doc Searls (56m 49s):
The law school.

Barbara Cherry (56m 53s):
Okay. What can horses teach us? So, and I met my husband because of horses. He had a horse, I'd have a horse in mutual horse, friends introduced. And that is a foundation for explaining that finally horses experience the world differently than we do. They are not prey predators. They're not predators, they're prey, animals. And so they exist in their environment. They're hypervigilant to their environment or in the sense that there are very aware if something doesn't feel right. OK. And there number one, defense, something doesn't feel right. So you split rather than trying to fight.

Barbara Cherry (57m 33s):
And they have a social grouping and they, they have their own hierarchy and the cue off each other, they live very much in the now in the present. Okay. And not worry about what happened yesterday. Not worried about tomorrow. It's like a continuing now are present. And so when you're with them and you interact with them, you learn how to be living more in the now for that time, you really want to bond and communicate. You can't be worried about yesterday. It can't be worried about tomorrow. Just be with them now. And what I have found is that it's very calming for me.

Barbara Cherry (58m 14s):
It's very calming for me. They are also very in tune to body language. So if you're thinking one thing and you try and pretend, let's say you were really upset or whatever, you'd try and pretend you are not. They'll look at you. Like, what would you say comes up? They sense cognitive dissonance. They mirror you as you are now. And as you, what you think you are, you are wanting to be the mirror. You, as you are, if you come in kind of all scrambled up or whatever, they feel it, there are very authentic that way. And so for that reason, and I'd have to pull another book off my shelf to find it, but it's been studied that horses. They now find are incredibly effective working with people with PTSD.

Barbara Cherry (58m 60s):
Wow. Because you see PTSD creates hyper-vigilance in this individual. And so courses are also hypervigilant. Okay? And there's a certain safety. You start to feel with them. And if you want to be with them and present with them, you have to be aware of where you are now. And so they'll mirror you as you are. So if you're upset or whatever, they'll mirror that. But as you start to calm down and get grounded and you learn to be around the horses or whatever, it's very soothing. They will mirror back to you. They will come up to you. Liquids lick you, all this kind of stuff, but you were acting funky.

Barbara Cherry (59m 41s):
They were like, what would you? And so they are finding that there are very effective and working with people with PTSD, not just PTSD, there are also effective. And working with people who have all sorts of other kinds of problems even said, this is why some of the camps that they send, like let's say teenagers, things that have had drug problems. They send them to places out in the West. They have call it an equine assisted therapy, getting them to be around horses. Being with nature. There are a way of getting you grounded in your body so you can integrate your mind and body become whole. Our species is unique in that we can separate.

Barbara Cherry (1h 0m 25s):
We have the ability for our rational brain's analytical brain is to take us off in another direction from what we're the body is really at. And a lot of problems, human space, which include PTSD has not being integrated. Being around horses helps you integrate and become a whole person and not stay stuck like an, a trauma or, or not stay stuck. And dysfunctional behavior is the most incredible thing I can say. I mean, through this whole COVID thing, fortunate for me, the barn has always remained open. And that's been, even though we took certain precautions, but there's not a high number of traffic for people.

Barbara Cherry (1h 1m 5s):
And I can tell you how much I enjoy going out to the barn and being with my horses. And they teach you a way I can interact better with people because of getting grounded with horses.

4 (1h 1m 21s):
Well,

Barbara Cherry (1h 1m 22s):
I, it gets me calm. I feel safe with them. And they're unusual. And that here with you have animals of such size, unlike dogs, which are predators, and the other thing with horses of their sites, you can not get a horse to do something you don't wanna do it. And so on also physically being around a bill, being that, you know, for the most part, my horses are, you know, like over a thousand pounds, okay. There are big sized horses. Do you have an animal? All of that size. I want to have a bond with you to want to be a partner. You know, when your, really with a horse is a partnership, there are one of a relatively small number of species that can be domesticated. And the fact that, of that size, they choose to be with you one to interact with you and have a bond with you, and that you can't do it by just out muscling them.

Barbara Cherry (1h 2m 10s):
Hmm. You know what I'm saying? That is a true partnership. When you're really working with horses as a partner, it's a whole integrated in your body and mind. And then of course, when you're riding, it takes it to a whole nother level. I've never, you know, some people talk about Flo what it's like for an athlete to be in flow that term. I get it. But when I ride and that's, because now I'm integrating with another species, you know? And when you see in pairs figure skating, it's a man and a woman who just they're balanced with each other. Well, imagine that with a horse and rider, it's an inter species balancing act and to have a horse have this size while you're the writer.

Barbara Cherry (1h 2m 50s):
And he was willing to submit, to say, this is where I want you to go. I want me to go over here and I want you to do it a truck or a Cantor, or I want to be more connected or not. Or I want you to jump that fence, the kind of bond that you developed with a horse we're as a team, you are truly partners and you are queuing on each other physically. And just the most amazing thing. And I think it could help people get more grounded in their bodies. I think on one of the downsides of our civilization is increasingly we have come out of our bodies, doing things more sedentary, or on a desk or a computer.

Barbara Cherry (1h 3m 31s):
We forget what it's like to inhabit or body and, and to feel like a whole being, and for me, horses, give me that hope I can go on too long for that. But yeah,

5 (1h 3m 41s):
That's great. And that's a great way to, to, to, to rap. And it, because it is almost a call for action to people to get to at least get out of their chairs, to integrate with the feature because we can get over it. Yeah.

Barbara Cherry (1h 3m 54s):
Yeah. Because if you have the TV on and get all this kind of stuff, we did not evolve for that. Yeah. We needed to get back and restore a balance for what our biology is geared for. That can help us better manage them, all these other things, our official things that you've created. So for me, I keep trying to get a recharge through my horses, helps me recharge and be able to reengage again. But horses are a very unusual in that regard, in a very special kind of bond. You can have it with them and thanks for asking, but there are an integral part of my own.

5 (1h 4m 25s):
I know they are. I know they are. Okay. Well, thank you so much. <inaudible>.