Here’s a simple plea to journalists, interviewers, and podcasters: After you interview me, please let me know when your article or interview will be published!
This blog is one of the most popular resources on meeting design, so I frequently receive interview requests. Journalists often seek my insights on current issues, quoting me in their articles. Meeting industry publications reach out after reading my posts or comments. Podcasters are always on the lookout for interesting guests. All these folks contact me, and I’m usually happy to oblige!
At the end of each interview, I always ask to be informed when the piece will go live. The response is usually positive—”Yes, I’ll be in touch as soon as I know.”
Yet, experience has taught me that only about one in ten interviewers actually follow through.
Often, I learn about published articles weeks later—sometimes through a colleague or a Google Alert I’ve set up with my name. This delay is unnecessary and a missed opportunity.
Interviewers—let me help you!
I want to know when your article or podcast is released for three main reasons:
I genuinely enjoy seeing my name in print and my ideas reaching a wider audience. I’m passionate about my work, and it’s gratifying to see it shared.
I appreciate writers who keep their word, and I’m more inclined to build a relationship with those who do.
Most importantly, if I know your publication date, I can help amplify your content! I have a large following on social media and often repost content on this blog. Let me help you extend your reach.
Finding out about an article weeks after it’s published makes it much less likely that I’ll share it.
Some do better than others
Print media often struggle with keeping me informed, while podcasters tend to do a better job. Most podcasters will reach out when their episode goes live.
Previewing articles
I often offer to preview articles to provide feedback on how my interview is represented. (I always emphasize that writers can ignore my suggestions 😀.) Some journalists appreciate the input, while others politely decline—and that’s completely fine.
Most journalists do a great job without my feedback. A few have misrepresented me, but c’est la vie.
Excuses, excuses
I understand why it can be challenging to inform sources about publication dates:
Interviewers often don’t know the publication date immediately, especially if the piece isn’t on a tight deadline.
Tracking and remembering requests like mine can be cumbersome, especially when publication might be months away.
Some interviewers aren’t even informed when their work will be published by their employers.
I truly appreciate the rare interviewer who admits upfront that they may forget to follow up or may not have access to the publication date. At least that way, I know what to expect.
Journalists, interviewers, and podcasters: listen up!
Please keep me in the loop when your article or interview is published! It’s a win-win for both of us.
There’s no shortage of confident futurists. Unfortunately, based on results, we’re not particularly good at predicting the future.
Why is Predicting the Future Important?
Predicting the future has become increasingly vital as the pace of change in human societies accelerates. Without accurate forecasts, the negative consequences of unforeseen challenges can escalate.
Some global trends offer optimism: Incomes are rising (despite persistent disparities), poverty is steadily declining, people are living longer, wars are fewer and shorter, and the gender gap in education and income is narrowing.
However, many global trends are deeply concerning: Climate disasters, aging populations, increasing pandemic outbreaks, and ongoing geopolitical instability paired with more lethal technologies are just a few of the alarming issues.
Four Reasons We’re Bad at Predicting the Future
1. Human Nature Is Resistant to Change
Despite our desire to believe we are rational beings making decisions based on facts and science, it turns out that people are primarily driven by emotions, not reason.
At first sight, history seems to provide evidence that people can change. For instance, in the United States, a restrictive form of democracy was adopted in 1787, slavery was abolished in 1866, and most women gained the right to vote in 1920. However, these societal changes remain controversial even today.
Pundits often focus on cultural changes, overestimating how people’s fundamental psychological and emotional responses to experiences and issues evolve over time.
2. Technology Changes Everything—Faster and Faster
Alan Kay once said, “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.”
“We are enveloped by rapidly changing technology and we fixate on what is new. What was new quickly becomes taken for granted and largely invisible. As David Weinberger remarks: “Technology sinks below our consciousness like the eye blinks our brain filters out.”
Although technology in the form of human tools has existed for over three million years and we’ve had books for over half a millennium, the first history of technology wasn’t written until 1954.”
The invisibility of most technology and the escalating pace of innovations make it very difficult to predict how they will impact our lives.
Seth Godin illustrates this as follows:
“In a bad 1950s science fiction movie, you might see flying jetpacks, invisibility cloaks and ray guns.
What we got instead is a device that fits in our pocket. It allows us to connect to more than a billion people. It knows where we are and where we’re going. It has all of our contacts, the sum total of all published knowledge, an artificially intelligent computer that can understand and speak in our language, one of the best cameras ever developed, a video camera with editor, a universal translator and a system that can measure our heart rate. We can look up real time pricing and inventory data, listen to trained actors read us audiobooks and identify any song, any plant or any bird. We can see the reviews from our community of nearby restaurants or even the reputation of a doctor or lawyer. It can track the location of our loved ones and call us a chauffeured vehicle at the touch of a button.
And of course, we use it to have arguments. And to watch very short stupid videos.”
True, some people, like Isaac Asimov, have accurately predicted specific futures, but we tend to remember their successes and overlook the many incorrect predictions.
3. We Struggle to Predict the Speed of Change
Even when people successfully predict future developments, they rarely get the timing right.
happen.
Here are three examples:
Solar energy
In 1978, I started a solar manufacturing company, convinced that solar energy would become an important energy source. For five years we thrived building solar hot water heating systems, selling and installing them around New England. When Ronald Reagan became president he abolished the existing solar tax credits and the solar industry disappeared for twenty years.
We were right, but it took over forty years. Who knew it would take so long? No one!
Fusion power
Research into generating power from nuclear fusion reactions began in the 1940s. The goal of creating a sustained, net-power-producing fusion reactor has been around for fifty years, but fusion continues to remain “10, 20, or 30 years away”, depending on who you ask.
Meeting process
I have been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich conferences for over thirty years, and evangelizing the advantages of this approach since 2009. While the meeting industry is slowly realizing the importance of facilitating connection at events, traditional conferences still dominate. Whether my approaches will ever become mainstream remains uncertain.
There are many other examples
For example, predicting when the COVID pandemic will be over, the length and severity of wars, and the speed of acceptance of gay marriage in the United States come immediately to mind. You can doubtless think of more.
4. Technology Changes Our Lives in Unpredictable Ways
Futurists’ jobs are made even harder by what Kevin Kelly, in his thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, points out: The technology we create changes humans in ways that we couldn’t imagine.
In the early 1990s, I was one of the first users of the commercial internet. I was an IT consultant at the time and my enthusiastic conviction that the internet would change everything fell on deaf ears. Several CEOs told me later they wished they’d listened to me. Seth Godin supplies examples above of how the internet has indeed changed everything in unexpected ways.
How many of the social impacts of cars were predicted when they began to be mass-produced a century ago?
Or the impacts of developments in religion, law, political systems, medicine, and education on our lives?
Can we predict the future?
In my opinion, anyone who confidently predicts the future is guilty of hubris. Unfortunately, that won’t stop people from trying.
We spend a lot of time talking about problems, effects, and causes.
But, sadly, we talk mainly about the effects of problems rather than focus on their causes.
If you ask people what are the most pressing problems in the world today they’ll mention things like the climate emergency, multiple wars, and (well, certainly in 2020) pandemics. We all want someone to “solve” these problems. But when we talk about such problems in this way, we are focusing on effects not causes.
The climate emergency
“Everybody talks about the weather climate, but nobody does anything about it.”
We talk incessantly about the effects of the unusual weather we’ve been having the last few years and decades.
But global warming creating a climate emergency has causes. And we know what they are. The massive generation of greenhouse gases generated over the last 200 years by the burning of fossil fuels. It’s time to stop focusing on the effects of human activity and focus on the causes, and what we have to do to change them.
Wars
Similarly, we read every day about the multiple horrific wars raging around our planet. Sometimes, they’ve been going on so long, they’ve become part of our mental wallpaper.
These wars are not the outcome of a chance event we can only wring our hands at. They are the creations of corrupt and/or mentally ill human beings (e.g. Putin, Netanyahu) driven by their internal demons to wreak havoc on the world. Or the culmination of decades of mistrust and abuse by one culture against another (e.g., Israel versus Hamas).
We rightly wring our hands over the devastating effects of wars, and try not to think about their causes.
Pandemics
And while pandemics are not directly caused by human actions, their severity and duration are. In the 6 year of the COVID pandemic, the virus continues to kill thousands every week and inflict severe long-term illnesses on millions. And we already know the causes, and methods (e.g., 1, 2) to mitigate this suffering. Yet there’s no question that we could do a much better job in reducing the loss of life and its quality.
Effects versus causes
Human beings respond in these ways for complicated reasons.
Extricating ourselves from these messes is very difficult.
But as long as we concentrate on problems that we define as effects, instead of exploring, understanding, and acting on the causes, we will continue to live in a world that contains far more misery than there needs to be.
Particle Physicists Agree on a Road Map for the Next Decade
I’m skeptical this is a good use of public funds. Here’s my response, written as a comment to the NY Times article.
“I have an ancient Ph.D. in experimental high-energy particle physics from working (lucky me) on one of the most important experiments in the second half of the 20th century; the discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN. This was the first evidence that the Weinberg–Salam electroweak theory was correct, leading to the reduction of the number of separate fundamental force theories from four to three (gravity, electroweak, and strong).
I left the field in 1978 and, in retrospect, I’m glad I did. Before I left, the Higgs boson had already been predicted by the Standard Model, and its eventual discovery in 2012 did not give us any new fundamental physics.
Some would disagree, but I and many other physicists think there have been no significant advances in experimental particle physics in the last fifty years.
Meanwhile, theoretical physicists have been futzing around with string theory for the same period with little success. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t a brilliant grad student who might be making a breakthrough right now. Theoretical physics needs to continue.
Though understanding our universe through science is incredibly important, it’s hard for me to be positive about spending the kind of money described in this article on experiments _until_ we have some new physics theories we can afford to test.”
Responses
This was the sixth-highest “Reader Picks” comment on the article, and it garnered a couple of replies. One argued that the experimental confirmation of neutrino oscillations/mass and the Higgs boson were noteworthy. I agree that these experiments were important, though both had been predicted by theoretical physicists before I got my Ph.D. The other agreed with me:
“Exactly! What theories can help us unify quantum and general relativity? What testable hypotheses do the theories imply? And what do THOSE experiments cost to run? CERN’s LHC hasn’t yielded “new physics.” Why should we believe a bigger particle accelerator will? Would we be better served say, using the same funds for space telescopes, advanced super computers, etc?”
I am resigned to the fact that OpenAI‘s Large Language ModelChatGPT has scraped every blog post I’ve written here (over 750 posts in the last 13 years—around half a million words) so it can parrot my thoughts about meeting design, facilitation, and other topics. But I felt surprised, dismayed, and angry to discover that this $10 billion company had misappropriated my copyright, by digesting my copyrighted book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love without any notification, discussion, or thought of compensation.
ChatGPT can be a useful tool. But does its utility justify OpenAI blatantly misappropriating copyright materials for its benefit?
I don’t think so.
ChatGPT, owned by OpenAI, has misappropriated my copyright
“The bigger concern is how ChatGPT concentrates wealth for its owners off of copyrighted work. It’s not clear if the current state of copyright law is up to the challenge of tools like it, which treat the internet as a free source of training data. Among other challenges, ChatGPT is fundamentally opaque. It is essentially impossible to track down whose copyrighted material is being drawn from in the prose it produces, suggesting every result may comprise multiple violations.”
—Jenna Burrell, ChatGPT and Copyright: The Ultimate Appropriation
Last week, the FTC opened an investigation into OpenAI, over whether ChatGPT has harmed consumers through its collection of data and its publication of false information on individuals. Though it seems that the investigation focuses on harm to consumers rather than the wholesale misappropriation of copyrighted information, I’m glad that the U.S. government is at least aware of ChatGPT’s impact on society in general.
This brings us to my stake in OpenAI’s land grab. You may be wondering how I know that ChatGPT has ingested a copy of my first book (and, for all I know, my other books as well). I’m not going to provide specific evidence here, though it’s along the lines of the AP News story linked above, and I’m confident that my evidence is persuasive. What I will provide, however, is already in the public domain, via a comment I made to the New York Times story about the FTC investigation into OpenAI [guest link].
I share my thoughts with the New York Times
In my comment, I shared how OpenAI misappropriated my copyright, provoking many comments and questions to which I responded.
Because the comment thread illuminates and expands on my thoughts, I have reproduced it in full below with my comments in red. I’ve also rearranged the comments so they are in thread order.
Click on the comments button below the subhead; and
click Reader Picks, which will bring my comment to the top.
AJS commented July 13 USA The content of at least one of my books on meeting design, copyright registered in 2010 with the United States Copyright Office, has been added to ChatGPT’s database without my permission. It was probably scraped from one of the illegal pirate internet libraries of scanned books.
Though I’m weakly flattered that ChatGPT has also incorporated every single post I’ve written on my meeting design blog (over 750 posts in the last 13 years—around half a million words), OpenAI’s flagrant misappropriation of copyrighted works from pirate databases for their own financial gain is beyond the pale.
191 Recommend 16 REPLIES
Robert commented July 13 St Paul
@AJS That’s an interesting argument, but how is ChatGPT’s use of that information substantively different than what data aggregators, including behemoths like Google, have been doing for years?
ChatGPT is just a shell overlayed onto a data set. It processes searches and responses in a natural language format, but that’s more of a superficial than substantive difference.
Are you opposed to all services that have scraped, categorized, and made your writings available, or is there something different about ChatGPT that you’re opposed to?
10 Recommend
AJS commented July 13 USA @Robert, unlike my blog posts which are freely available for anyone with an internet connection to read, I have never made my copyrighted book available for free public reading on the internet. People have to pay to buy a legal copy. Do you really think it’s perfectly OK for ChatGPT to illegally add a pirated scanned copy of my book to their database?
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SteveRR commented July 13 CA
@AJS
Copyright refers to “copying” – so the first question is “did ChatGPT copy your work?”
It is more than likely that it did copy your work.
Second, Is ChatGPT Output a Derivative Work?
Most would probably argue that it is not a derivative work
Lastly – the infamous fair use:
If ChatGPT copied your work and such copying was not for a commercial purpose and had no economic impact on the copyright owner then it is probably fair use.
Your lawyers may disagree and that is what courts are for.
3 Recommend
Austin commented July 13 Austin TX
@SteveRR Fair use is specifically for “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research”. ChatGPT does neither. However, if it only uses snippets of sentences it would be ok. If it uses entire sentences or more, it could be a violation of copyright. BTW, registration is not necessary under US copyright. Copyright is automatic until the author releases it or waives it.
4 Recommended
SteveRR commented July 13 CA
@Austin
Not even the vaguest of clues where you get your “snippets of sentences” precedent.
Maybe look at fair use on youtube by way of example.
1 Recommend
AJS commented July 13 USA @SteveRR,
First, OpenAI is not creating LLMs that slurp up everything they can get their CPUs on for the good of mankind. Rather, they are hoping to make a bazillion bucks ASAP. So I think you can make a good case that their use of my copyrighted book is for “a commercial purpose”.
Second, if anyone can get their questions they have about meeting design answered by ChatGPT—which is coughing up a version of everything in my copyrighted books on the topic—why would anyone buy a copy of my books? Under those circumstances, I think you can conclude that OpenAI’s appropriation of the contents of my copyrighted book has an “economic impact” on me.
I am not a lawyer. And I am not going to spend the rest of my life suing the giant corporation that is OpenAI—I have better things to do. But it’s pretty clear that OpenAI’s plundering of copyrighted works for their own gain “because they can” is reprehensible.
1 Recommend
Jacob commented July 13 Henderson
@AJS how do you know it was added to the system, from one of those libraries? Because if your book was widely published, so much so, that it ended up in what you call an online pirate library, is it just as likely that they used book summary sites and online posts describing the contents of your book and not the pirate library, you suspect they used?
1 Recommend
AJS commented July 13 USA @Jacob, good question. I tested ChatGPT by asking it to summarize the most boring chapter in the book—one which has never been reviewed or mentioned. Search engines do not find any reference to the chapter; it has not been mentioned or extracted in any online review or post.
ChatGPT gave such an accurate summary of the chapter, it’s clear that the platform database includes it in its entirety.
I’ll probably never know how OpenAI got its hands on my book’s contents unless someone with deep pockets sues OpenAI and uses discovery to find out what is included in ChatGPT’s database and where they scraped it from.
5 Recommend
Jlaw commented July 13 California
@AJS on the one hand I see your point, on the other hand I can’t help wonder who really cares about a self published book but the author? I mean, no disrespect, but unless something is being said that isn’t true, I don’t see how an old book is worth depriving humanity from the latest and greatest in technology. This genie broke the bottle.
Recommend
AJS commented July 13 USA @Jlaw, I suspect the 3,000+ people who have purchased my self-published book cared. Are you seriously saying that a self-published book has no value except to its author?
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John G commented July 13 Boston
@AJS i agree with you. It seems like a lot of people try to thread the needle for ChatGPT. However, if I upload something copyrighted to YouTube, I get a DMCA take down. That’s because YouTube and I would be making money off of the copyrighted content. The fact that the copyrighted content is obscured the way it is in ChatGPT should make no difference. ChatGPT makes no effort to even reference or cite the source material.
It could even be argued that chatGPT is a derivative work when it provides snippets “in the style of” an author.
If I make a performance from a book, I have to acquire rights to do so. ChatGPT is a performance assembled from “samples” of other peoples work.
chatGPT is blatant intellectual property theft and should be shuttered with cease and desist orders until this is resolved. There are plenty of LLM efforts that have a much cleaner pedigree than chatGPT so we would not lose much in terms of technological advancement.
2 Recommended
Observer commented July 13 NYC
@AJS This is a fascinating case, but you are blurring lines between three concepts: (1) stealing one copy of your book, (2) copyright, and (3) attribution.
On piracy: OpenAI clearly owes you the $25 (or whatever it costs) for access to your book. But that doesn’t really seem to be what is bothering you.
On copyright: OpenAI could be violating your copyright whether or not they bought your book. If they bought it legally and then reprinted exact passages, that would be a copyright violation. But the way OpenAI answers questions is arguably no different than a person who has learned the material. If I buy one of your books and answer questions someone asks me about it, that doesn’t necessarily make me a copyright violator.
It is a brand new technology that poses problems that aren’t addressed by copyright law. And, personally, I sincerely hope they are *not* found to be violating copyright law because the potential value of their service is so great. Transformational, really, in areas like medicine.
On credit: OpenAI should arguably still credit you as the source for their information. And I am certain they are working on this.
But so far, it seems like you are out $25. A bit piratical, but not a flagrant misappropriation.
2 Recommend
AJS commented July 13 USA @Observer, but OpenAI _didn’t_ buy a copy of my book and then incorporate it into their database. And they have no intention of doing so.
Your argument is equivalent to saying someone can steal thousands of books from a bookstore, and if they get caught they can just pay for the books and everything is fine. I’m not sure our society would work so well if that was how copyright worked.
1 Recommend
John G commented July 13 Boston
@Observer if chatGPT is like a person, then you could say it is answering questions like a human. If it is like a program, then it is answering from the raw data.
It is most decidedly not like a person.
The “person” here is openai the corporation, which has used a vast array of copyrighted work to create a commercial product which makes money off of that copyrighted work. This would be no different than a company of hundreds of employees buying one copy of a book, copying it to all employees to enable them to answer questions, which violates the author’s rights.
Recommend
JN commented July 13 NY
@AJS
For the sake of argument, are you ok if OpenAI actually paid for a copy of your book before using it as training data for ChatGPT in the pursuit of knowledge?
Recommend
AJS commented July 14 USA @JN, As pointed out in earlier comments, OpenAI purchasing one copy of my book… 1) …didn’t and isn’t going to happen, and 2)…doesn’t give OpenAI the right to use it in ways that violate my copyright (see the argument about fair use). Just as movie studios don’t get the right to make a movie of a book if they buy a copy—they typically pay a few percent of production costs to the copyright owner. Just as libraries don’t have the right to buy and scan one physical book and lend it to as many patrons as they like. Libraries also negotiate payments that are far more than the retail cost of an ebook for the right to lend it to multiple patrons. OpenAI has ignored these and other existing compensation models for copyright holders and simply taken everything they wanted for their database without discussion or a shred of conscience.
Recommend
What should OpenAI do?
OpenAI has misappropriated my copyright. I’m not happy about this, and pessimistic that this huge tech-bro-driven corporation will be brought to heel for its immoral behavior. Some authors and artists have responded by deciding to remove their content from the internet. I think this is the wrong approach. I want large corporations like OpenAI to stop misappropriating copyrighted work. OpenAI has several ethical options. The company could:
Stop including copyrighted work in their database; or
Ask creators for permission to include their content; or
Negotiate an agreement to use copyrighted work.
Any of these options would be a positive step, showing respect for the creators of copyrighted material, rather than misappropriating their work.
It’s time for a “sound of silence” roundup of meetings industry pet peeves.
“…the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence” —Simon & Garfunkel – Sound Of Silence (1965)
Venue air quality is still a secret
How many venues have upgraded their HVAC systems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Unfortunately, only The Shadow knows! I’ve never seen a venue website that features air quality upgrades, though the information is sometimes available on an obscure page. These days, I’ve found that if I call a venue, they will usually tell me what they’ve done. If anything.
It’s true that COVID-19 is not quite as serious an illness as it was in the earlier stages of the pandemic for most people. Death rates in the U.S. are now down to around a mere 1,000 a week. It’s still one of the top ten reasons people die. But with elderly and immunocompromised people at high risk, and the unknown chance of contracting Long COVID, the meeting industry is still largely shirking its duty of care.
A hat tip to the Javits Center and The Venetian for having done the work! Who else has upgraded their air filtration systems to MERV 13 or better? Share in the comments!
If you think about it, this is shocking. We spend vast sums of money and devote countless person-hours to holding a meeting. Yet we have no idea whether it made any significant long-term difference to the people who attended it!
Check out the above link for three tools you can use to explore the long-term impact of an event.
But I’m not holding my breath that any of them will be routinely deployed at meetings soon.
The continuing takeover of meeting industry education by suppliers with deep pockets
In my opinion (and many other event professionals with whom I’ve spoken) the educational content at the national meeting industry events these days is sub-par. I suspect it’s because the processes for choosing it are seriously flawed and completely opaque. Educational programs remain dominated by representatives of suppliers and sponsors who provide significant income to the industry association.
I’m not saying supplier and sponsor employees are incapable of providing good education, but there are a host of independent educators (yes, like myself) who have been relegated to the sound of silence over the last fifteen years. This is largely due to our unwillingness to share our valuable experience and experience at our own expense (no fee, no coverage of travel, meals, or accommodation.)
Don’t pay presenters unless they’re big names
Following up on the previous peeve. I’ve written a couple of posts (1, 2) about the reluctance of the meeting industry to pay presenters unless they are household names and are seen as “inspirational”.
Nothing has changed in the last ten years.
Fighting the sound of silence
“Hello, darkness, my old friend I’ve come to talk with you again… …People hearing without listening”
I’m going to close with a short tribute to someone in our industry who personifies the opposite of the sound of silence.
Her name is Joan Eisenstodt. Anyone who is truly listening will hear her. For decades she has spoken out about a myriad of often-overlooked issues in the meeting industry—the lack of care for the safety and wellbeing of the venue and hospitality employees that make our meetings possible, the lip service paid to DEI, ableism, the underrepresentation of minorities and women in positions of power, and the dire consequences of political decisions made at both the Federal and State level—to name just a few.
I think many would agree with me that she has been and remains the voice of conscience of our industry.
It’s a hard road to travel. I know I sometimes feel discouraged that some of the ideas I have shared have not become as widely accepted as I would like. So I wrote this to her recently:
“Dear Joan, Sometimes it feels as though no one is listening and our efforts are fruitless. But, Joan, I hope you know that you do make a difference. Many people listen to you. Many are influenced in ways you’ll never know. In my case, you have inspired me over the years to speak out more about important issues. You have influenced me, and I am grateful for it. And so are many in our industry. You fight the good fight and make good trouble. Bless you for it.”
Let’s dispel the sound of silence as Joan does. Our industry will be a better place when we do.
November 2022: Three recent events made me notice the ways our society’s establishment deflects criticism.
Veterans Day
Growing up in England taught me little about U.S. history, so it was only this year I learned that Veterans Day, first observed in 1919, was originally known as Armistice Day. (It’s still called this in France, while other countries call it Remembrance Day).
An armistice is an agreement to stop fighting a war. As President Woodrow Wilson said on the first Armistice Day, held at the end of World War I:
“…the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men.”
It’s great that we have a day to honor veterans. But what struck me when I learned about the name change in 1954 from Armistice Day to Veterans Day is that it deflected citizen attention from reinforcing the goal of ending war. The establishment eliminated Armistice Day—a day commemorating the end of war—and changed the focus to a day to honor military veterans.
I was three years old when politicians eliminated Armistice Day from our cultural vocabulary, and I don’t know the circumstances. But it’s easy to see the act as a cynical repression by the establishment of the concept that ending war is a noble and worthy goal for humanity.
When authorities bother to suggest precautions against the spread of COVID, they restrict any advice to wearing masks when indoors with others.
Wearing masks is an important prevention strategy that reduces personal risk and one’s risk of infecting others. But when many people eschew masking, COVID is going to be with us for a long time. Many more people will die and become disabled.
What authorities never mention is a far more effective prevention strategy that would, if comprehensively implemented, essentially wipe out COVID and other airborne diseases.
I’m talking, of course, about improving indoor air quality in buildings. Especially public buildings.
We have known for a hundred years the importance of providing fresh indoor air, and the necessary technology is widely available. Making our buildings safe by requiring adequate air changes/hour plus virus filtering provides permanent protection against viral epidemics. Not just COVID and flu, but past and future pandemics too.
Emphasizing individual masking while avoiding any society-wide attempts to improve building air quality is another example of how the establishment deflects responsibility for disease prevention away from our institutions and onto individuals.
After especially violent crimes like these, many who continue to resist any meaningful restrictions on the fetish of gun ownership in this country trot out the phrase “thoughts and prayers”. Of course, these platitudes do nothing to change the civilian slaughter rate, some 21,000 people (not including gun suicides) in 2021.
Politically powerful groups, heavily funded by the gun industry, repeatedly mouth “thoughts and prayers” but do nothing to change the daily carnage that easily available guns cause. These elites deflect our populace from thinking about whether the U.S. might be able to reduce gun violence and deaths by such systemic changes as keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring background checks for all gun sales, and banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. All things that are done in other developed countries, with significant results.
Instead, the establishment relentlessly promotes the idea that Americans should take individual responsibility to protect themselves and their loved ones by buying guns of their own. The gun industry makes money, and the cycle of gun violence continues.
There are many more examples
There are many more examples of how our society’s establishment deflects criticism by emphasizing personal responsibility rather than systemic solutions to problems. These are just three that came up for me this week. If you would like to add your own examples, feel free to do so in the comments below.
This is the story of how I met a silver-tongued thief named Seth Andrew, and how he wreaked havoc on a host of lives in my community until the FBI caught him stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter schools he founded and a federal court sentenced him to jail.
I meet Seth Andrew
I first met Seth on May 28, 2020, the day it was announced his non-profit had purchased the former Marlboro College campus. We “met” in a conversation on a public Facebook group for Marlboro College alumni. (I was a professor at the school for ten years.) He said he would use it for a new college, “Degrees of Freedom“, which “students from disenfranchised communities” would be able to attend for free.
I have decades of experience working with non-profits. So, it was easy for me to research the public financials of his two relevant non-profits, Democracy Builders and Democracy Builders Fund. What I found was unusual. Neither non-profit had recently filed timely 990 returns as required by law. And the older returns available showed no conceivable financial resources to handle the approximately one million dollars of annual operating outgoings needed to maintain the 550-acre college campus.
I wondered if the late filings had been an oversight. So during our first meeting, I asked him.
The resulting conversation is still available here, with one important change. Seth subsequently deleted all his comments from it. Here’s the original screenshot of our interchange.
As you can see, Seth is extraordinarily evasive about my simple questions. He keeps trying to change the subject. Finally, he says, “I don’t think we’re going to be much more productive here, so I’m going to log off.”
At this point, it was clear to me that Seth Andrew was hiding something.
Despite serious concerns, the campus sale goes through
During the next couple of weeks, Seth Andrew was the subject of allegations of racism by Black N Brown at DP, a group of Democracy Prep students, alumni, and present/former staff of color. The group claimed that Andrew and the schools he founded had built an education system rife with systemic racism and manipulative behavior toward people of color.
The sale of the Marlboro College campus still had to be reviewed and approved by the Vermont Attorney General, TJ Donovan. On June 18, 2020, I and five other Marlboro long-time residents sent a letter to TJ Donovan, detailing our concerns, with special emphasis on his lack of financial resources to maintain the campus in good condition.
At this point, we didn’t know that Seth had stolen the money that his non-profit, Democracy Builders Fund, needed to buy the campus. In the summer he moved into town, living in one of the campus properties. What ensued was a nightmare for the inhabitants of the Town of Marlboro, Vermont, which continued long after his arrest in April 2021. Someone could write a book about the bizarre consequences. Here are some of them…
The consequences were disastrous. Both parties subsequently said they owned the property. It became impossible for the Marlboro Music Festival, a town fixture since 1951 with a 99-year lease to use the campus each summer, to know to whom to pay rent. Meanwhile, DBF was unable to pay maintenance costs on the campus. This forced the Marlboro Music Festival to go to court and work out an expensive agreement to take charge of the campus after Seth’s arrest.
This land is my land. This land’s not your land.
For hundreds of years, Vermont law has permitted hunting, fishing, hiking, and mountain biking on private property without permission unless the land is legally posted. Though Marlboro College’s 550 acres of land have never been posted, and its 17 miles of trails enjoyed by all for decades, Seth had angry confrontations with people whom he met while walking in the woods, telling them they were not welcome on his property.
Seth tried to get the local public elementary school to move to the campus, presumably to help prop up his worsening finances. For some reason, perhaps because of the previously mentioned allegations of racism tied to his tenure at Democracy Prep, he lied publicly about his involvement with Democracy Prep, telling the Marlboro School Board on June 29, 2020, that he “left in 2013”. (There’s a recording of him saying this.) In reality, Democracy Prep paid Seth more than $400,000 between 2015 and 2017.
Meanwhile, despite multiple proclamations to the contrary, Seth’s Degrees of Freedom college program never seriously applied for any accreditation, a basic requirement to allow students to participate in federal financial aid programs. Without accreditation-based financial aid, Seth’s entire pitch for a college that students from disenfranchised communities could attend for free turned out to be an imaginative fantasy. The staff Seth chose to run the program were quickly out of a job once Seth’s arrest became public.
I could go on
We’ll never know what other fantastic developments would have happened because, on April 27, 2021, the U.S. Government made a bombshell announcement.
I finally understood how disconcerting it must have been to Seth on May 28, 2020, when I started our conversation by asking about the missing financials for his non-profits, just after he had used the stolen money to purchase the campus.
[Seth’s court dockets can be accessed here and here.]
In January 2022, Seth pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and agreed to an advisory sentencing guideline range of 21 – 27 months. He agreed to repay the money he had stolen, plus some additional fees.
Seth made several requests to adjourn his sentencing date, which the court finally set as July 29, 2022. On July 24, Seth sent a submission to the court arguing that he should serve no jail time. In response, numerous submissions by the prosecutors, defense, and various other parties (including yours truly) followed.
1—Why was Democracy Builders’ million-dollar Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) payout for 270 claimed workers given to just 41 workers?
On May 1, 2020, Seth’s Democracy Builders Fund received a loan of $943,365 in federal COVID relief funds. As journalists C.B. Hall and Lola Duffort subsequently documented [1, 2], the application from Democracy Builders Fund, described as an “S corporation” [it isn’t] with an address in San Francisco (!), reported that the loan would support 270 jobs.
The compensation provided under the [$943,365] loan was considerable. The funds were used in a period of less than six months, from May 1 to October 16, 2020, according to documentation obtained by VBM. The accounting states that several employees received more than $40,000 during that period, with Andrew, then DBF’s guiding figure, getting paid almost $46,000…
The accounting lists 41 employees paid through the loan. Total cash compensation to them exceeded the $943,365 loan amount by about $39,000…
The source told VBM that the list included every employee paid with the first loan, and described it as “a fact” that DBF did not have the payroll it was claiming.
“There were not 270 jobs saved,” the individual said. A second source familiar with the matter, who likewise requested anonymity, had no knowledge of any affected employees beyond the 41 accounted for.
Both sources told VBM that approximately 30 of the 41, although employees of DBF, were in practice working on programs at an organization called VoteAmerica.
The California secretary of state’s database lists VoteAmerica, which works to encourage voting, as a nonprofit located at the contact address that DBF used in its loan application. VoteAmerica was at the time described as a project of DBF on the latter’s website; as a tax-exempt nonprofit, DBF served as VoteAmerica’s fiscal sponsor until the latter subsequently acquired its own tax exemption under the IRS code, and it no longer receives any mention on the website.
VBM’s research indicated that about 10 of the 41 were DBF’s own workers, whether in Marlboro or at the organization’s office in New York City. DBF does not appear anywhere in the California secretary of state’s database.
Citing policy against discussing client matters, Insperity group account manager Elaine Matthews declined to respond to an inquiry seeking clarifications as to the more than 200 jobs not accounted for.
How come the almost $1 million in federal COVID relief funds was spent on jobs for just 41 workers, rather than the 270 claimed in the PPP application?
We may never know.
2—Why have Marlboro College’s Campus Working Group and Board of Trustees never explained or apologized for their clear negligence to perform due financial diligence on Seth’s non-profits?
When the Marlboro College Board of Trustees (BoT) decided that the college had to close, the board set up a Campus Working Group (CWG) to solicit and evaluate potential purchasers for the campus. The CWG was led by four BoT members and also included alumni, college faculty & staff & students, and the head of the Marlboro Town Selectboard. All CWG members had to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
As I’ve documented above, a glance at the Democracy Builders and Democracy Builders Fund public financials showed these entities had never had any significant capital resources. They had not filed recent non-profit 990s as required by law. And when I asked Seth about these basic financial necessities on Facebook, it was evident that he was extremely uncomfortable with my questions, kept trying to change the subject, and eventually refused to engage further.
It took me an hour to uncover these issues, which should have quashed Seth’s bid for the campus. Perhaps Seth told the CWG that he had bags of money available from another source. If so, the CWG & BoT should have carefully verified that this was true before selling the campus to Seth. We now know that Seth had no significant funds available to him at all, as he admitted in a statement to the court that he used all the money he stole from Democracy Prep to buy the campus!
If I, with no formal accounting background, could uncover such damning information about Seth’s financial resources so quickly, why on earth couldn’t the CWG & BoT have done the same? The only reasonable conclusion is that the CWG & BoT were grossly negligent in performing due financial diligence on Seth’s non-profits.
I’m frankly mystified why not a single member of the CWG or BoT has ever come forward to explain why they believed that selling the campus to Seth was a sound financial idea. Or apologize for putting this community—especially the town of Marlboro which suddenly had a thief and liar owning Potash Hill, and the Music Festival that had to sort out the resulting mess at great expense—through hell. There’s no reason why these folks can’t speak out now. Yes, CWG members signed an NDA, but there’s no one now left to sue them if they ignore it!
“I met Seth a few years later, when he reached out to me and gave me a tour of one of his co-located charter schools in Harlem.
I found him an intriguing character, obsessively throwing a rubber ball against the wall while we walked through the halls of the school, and never taking off his baseball hat though the network had a rigid dress code for students, who were forbidden to wear hats, wear the wrong color socks or the wrong kind of belt. When we were touring the school, he stopped one student in the hall and berated her for having her Uggs showing. I wondered how long he would last at his own charter school before being suspended or pushed out.”
Seth Andrew is a smart and talented guy. He’s also a thief and a convicted felon. It’s a shame that someone with his gifts has used them in such destructive ways. Fast-thinking silver-tongued folks like him can be dangerous members of society because they are so good at fooling people. I recommend Jerry Weinberg’s wise advice offered forty years ago:
I’ve only fired a gun once in my life. Hiking in former Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, I met a farmer who asked if I’d like to fire his shotgun. Standing in the middle of his field, I braced the gun against my shoulder, pointed it at the sky, and fired. The blast was deafening and my shoulder hurt.
The experience did not impress me. I had no desire ever to fire a gun again.
Owning guns is far more common in the U.S. than in any other country; there are more guns in private hands than people to hold them. The average U.S. gun owner has five guns, and about a third of all the civilian guns in the world are in the hands of Americans.
Guns and power-over
As children, we necessarily submit to power-over: the power of our parents and school. As we grow into adulthood, most cultures expect us to become more independent and possess our own power.
Unfortunately, for a host of reasons, many people fail to come into their own power. I, for example, grew up in an environment that relentlessly shamed me for making mistakes. I learned that I could only feel powerful if I did everything perfectly. It has taken decades for me to unlearn this false teaching, and work to learn who I actually am and be myself.
When we fail to come into our own power, we fear not being in control. One way to lessen this fear is to own guns as a substitute for one’s personal power.
Obviously, guns have legitimate uses for hunting, and I have the privilege of living in a part of the world where it’s unlikely that someone will attack me while living my life. However, the high incidence of gun ownership by privileged U.S. citizens owes a lot to the dysfunctional fear of not being in control.
Even though the reality is that no one ever actually has control, just the myth of control.
Power and pleasure
Some people, mainly men in my experience, enjoy firing guns. When asked why they typically say it’s fun or they enjoy the challenge to get good at it (see, e.g. this Quora thread).
This challenge I kind of get. Though I think there are much more interesting and useful challenges to take on than getting better at knocking something over or blowing it apart from a distance.
It’s the fun part I don’t understand.
The closest I’ve come to enjoying a powerful machine is the time I drove a race car in Abu Dhabi.
Driving a race car
Me, right after driving this race car.
I had fun!
I’m cautious about trying to “explain” why driving the Jaguar for twenty minutes felt so exciting. But I think it was because my race car experience was an exaggerated version of something I do daily which is pretty miraculous — drive a car.
Driving the race car took my daily driving to a whole new level. I drove faster than I’ve ever driven in my life. The race track was perfectly smooth, and the Jaguar was incredibly responsive. It wasn’t a useful experience, but it gave me a whole new and improved (sensation-wise) experience of something familiar.
Nevertheless, I have no significant desire to drive a race car again. (Though I think I’d do it if someone offered me the opportunity with no effort on my part, as happened in Abu Dhabi, that’s not likely to happen!)
So why is shooting a gun “fun”? The men who say this seem to assume it’s obvious. I’ll close these musings by wondering if their desire to shoot guns arises from fear of not being in control in a United States culture that links masculinity to the wielding of power.
“Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government[emphasis added].“
What else could you call the modern workplace, where superiors can issue changing orders, control attire, surveil correspondence, demand medical testing, define schedules, and monitor communication, such as social-media posts?
—Nathan Heller on Elizabeth Anderson, The Philosopher Redefining Equality
Society’s structure and governance impact almost every aspect of our lives. How civic discourse frames our actual structure and governance conditions what we think is ethical. Ever since Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith developed the concept of the free market, political economists have framed the choice for society as one between free markets and state control.
Anderson points out that this framing ignores the reality that the modern workplace increasingly controls adults’ lives. Such loss of individual autonomy threatens to reduce spontaneous connection and authentic community, both inside and outside work.
1984
We are still a long way from George Orwell’s 1984, where the Party only allowed conformist relationships. (Though the current rise of dictatorships around the world is an ominous sign for the future.) But we need to be aware of new kinds of oppression in private organizations. In addition to those mentioned above, organizations continue to further blur the line between work and personal. Corporations require more and more employees to respond to routine “emergencies” day or night.
The number of people with substantial autonomy in their work and life is decreasing with the rise of private government. This concerns me more than the historic tension between free markets and the state. With the ongoing collapse of unions and continuing consolidation of businesses, private government has fewer checks on its power. As a result, workers find it more and more difficult to resist new demands.
What to do?
The first step in tackling a problem is to notice it exists. We overlook the rise of private government by focusing on creating the “right” balance between free markets and state control. Free markets move inexorably towards the minimum “acceptable” competition, typically duopolies (think Uber versus Lyft). State power provides some limits on how much concentration of power occurs.
But inside organizations, there is little, if any, limit on what private government can impose on employees’ lives.
Public government is the only means workers have to communicate their desire to limit the suffocating effects of private government. Private government uses its vast resources to fight such efforts via well-funded media campaigns. Such campaigns use effective tools, such as polarizing and misleading memes, which work at an emotional level to demoralize opponents or sway audiences to an advantageous point of view.
The unchecked power of private government may only be curbed when its excesses become too much for workers to bear and a tipping point is reached. Until then, it’s important to work to increase awareness of the growing control that companies have over employees’ lives and the ensuing deleterious effects.
Here’s a simple plea to journalists, interviewers, and podcasters: After you interview me, please let me know when your article or interview will be published!
There’s no shortage of 
We spend a lot of time talking about problems, effects, and causes.
Similarly, we read every day about the multiple horrific wars raging around our planet. Sometimes, they’ve been going on so long, they’ve become part of our mental wallpaper.
I grew up in England where “
As someone who loves to facilitate connection between people, I was struck by this