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Episode: 1084
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Title: HPR1084: Paul Levy on Learning to Dance with Spiders
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1084/hpr1084.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:40:28
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---
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The Phone Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio in this episode, Paul Levy, on Learning
|
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to Dance with Spiders.
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Hello World and welcome to the Fold Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
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This episode consists of an interview with entrepreneur, thinker and author, Paul Levy.
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The founder of Cats 3000 and Rational Madness and author of the Play Texts, Paul is also
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convener of the Critical Incident Unconference, which together leads to Learning to Dance
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with Spiders, a workshop in which Paul shares some experiments from his book about living
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consciously with your mobile phone and staying in tact in the world of social media.
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It's truly groundbreaking, uncomfortable, but surprisingly useful.
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The Fold Circle Podcast is the companion to Fold Circle magazine, the independent magazine
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for the Ubuntu community.
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Find us at Fold Circle magazine.org forward slash podcast.
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So my first guest, I don't really know how to introduce.
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His name is Paul Levy, we've known each other for quite a few years from various things
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that we've got up to in Brighton, down on South Coast.
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I was just looking to see how best to introduce you, Paul, because you've got so many strings
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to your bow.
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You're like a one-man orchestra.
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Founder of Cats 3000, heading up the Rational Madness Theatre Group, producing the fringe
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review, this reviews, convening the Critical Incident Unconference, which we were at
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during the summer.
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You're also a fellow at Centrim for the University of Brighton, a bit of a relay-sonce
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man.
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Sounds like I need to retire, actually.
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Good evening.
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How you doing?
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Good thanks, yeah.
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I think they probably all tied together somehow, but I'm not quite sure how.
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Some of the themes that we were touching on at the Critical Incident earlier in the year,
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which I talked about on the podcast and put a couple of blog posts in about earlier
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in the summer.
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That was all about personal change, wasn't it?
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And a lot of your work that you do with companies and small businesses and organisations
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is all about change in development and learning.
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How do you care to tie the theatre connection into that?
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I think where that came about was I was actually looking for a way of sharing, I suppose, some
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of my own ideas about the world and started to realise that one of the most direct ways
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of doing that these days was through the medium of art and my background has always been
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in theatre.
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So I got very, very interested in how you could just put on a theatre play and get it to
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say something because it seems to address not just the head, but drama seems to address
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the heart, too.
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And as long as you're not too preachy about it, I think you can get ideas across and encourage
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reflection through dramas.
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So that's been one of the ways.
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And I know I write books and that kind of stuff too, even that doesn't seem to quite
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do it sometimes like a good scene from a play.
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I'm a theme of ideas and heads and hearts.
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One of the sessions that you facilitated at the critical instant was that strange thing
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that you called learning to dance with spiders.
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We all walked in not knowing quite what we were going to get and you kind of bought lots
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of people up short and suddenly had them examining their own sort of behaviours and habits.
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Do you just want to tell us what the basic idea behind learning to dance with spiders,
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what it was and where it came from?
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Well, we were putting together a piece of theatre called Text, which was exploring the whole
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world of relationships on mobile phones.
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And part of the background to that we were playing around with film was I actually came
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across a bit of film where you always find it these days on YouTube, of a jumping spider.
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And it's little kind of front, I don't know what you call them, pause our pincers.
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We're tapping away just like something we've been doing on blackberries when we were rehearsing,
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which were people's thumbs on mobile phones, at some point we were playing with iPhones.
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I put one bit of the film over the film of the rehearsal and suddenly the thumbs and
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the spider was very similar and that connected with an intuition I've had for a while that
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this wonderful set of inventions that are around mobile phones, social media laptops, that
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when you actually watch people and some tapping away and it's interesting when people can
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get into conversations using fingertips is even as it can be fast and amazing and witty and
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clever and quick.
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There's something kind of, I don't know, cold and intellectual and spidery about it too.
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And that was something that I was looking at.
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It's the dual nature of this technology that even as we embraced it and have the equivalent
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now of almost psychic connection across the world, there are people and this was what
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text explored, finding more intimacy through their fingertips, through a keyboard and
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being more open and sending more XXX kisses than they are actually in their physical
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tactile relationships and there's some kind of feeling here that it was something actually
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you can find in some forms of art too around technology that the most advanced technologies
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you know and there's comics about aliens are from spider like intellectual cold beings
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and my view is that that's not what I would like humanity to evolve into.
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And I think one of the things that we found in that workshop session that you led was
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to do with behaviours and how we are possibly sleepwalking unknowingly or unthinkingly into
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a new set of behaviours as that technology evolves.
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I think there's a couple of really interesting books around at the moment.
|
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Geron Lanier's book's been around for a while about you and not a gadget and Sherry
|
||||
Terkel who is writing about the loss of intimacy.
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These are not people that are rubbish in the technology but what they are doing is saying
|
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I think it's time to get conscious.
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Sherry Terkel thinks these technologies have come on so fast.
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It wouldn't do humanity any harm to just pause for a moment as a child that goes to meet
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their parents at school at the gates, finds that the parent is more interested in their
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Twitter status or and is giving them a half-halo and all that child is reaching out for
|
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or it's just a moment of intimacy, a moment of acknowledgement before they run off and
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play with their friends again.
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And that loss of intimacy, Sherry's book is called Alone Together and we interviewed
|
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her recently and she's talking about even as we're getting closer together, these technologies
|
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give us almost psychic connection.
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There's some kind of isolation that's going with it too and you know, the Reson Facebook
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recently, how many of your 1000 friends would really be there for you when you needed
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them?
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And some people say you shouldn't have that expectation and let's stop rubbishing it
|
||||
and saying that the word friend is meant to be something else now online but I'm just
|
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interested in this dual nature of even as the technologies are promising us more intimacy.
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There's something disconnecting as well and there's something about watching people and
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young people can do this, they're thumb texting in their pockets and there's something about
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fingertip connection I think that sometimes bypasses the hearts and I think it's the heart
|
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where our vulnerability actually gives us some kind of reality that might be starting
|
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to elude us with some of this technology.
|
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I mean, I think the key thing here is to make it clear that those writers I mentioned
|
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and myself, there are no general rules here saying this stuff is bad for you.
|
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If you're completely okay with these technologies, maybe even love them then embrace them then
|
||||
this stuff isn't for you but if you've started to feel maybe you are a little bit too dependent
|
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on these technologies then this kind of approach might be for you.
|
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Just to go back to that workshop session that we were sat in, you threw us a few little
|
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exercises at the beginning of the session just to try and ascertain our state of dependence.
|
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Can you just go through a couple of those things just for the benefit of the listeners and
|
||||
they maybe do their own little test and see how dependent they are on their devices?
|
||||
One of the tests of the exercise is your ability to do without it.
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That's always been a test of it.
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Just to have the option of being able to is quite important.
|
||||
Actually one of the simplest ones to try would be can you actually not take your phone
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with you to bed and the big excuse everyone gives you is well it's my alarm clock but
|
||||
I think it's a lame excuse.
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You can get alarm clocks.
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Do you actually need your computer on your lap in bed?
|
||||
So there's some exercises that are just simple around trying to exist without a computer.
|
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The classic one with a computer is actually during that very annoying moment that Windows
|
||||
PCs or probably a couple of minutes are warming up.
|
||||
It's just to set yourself a little list of what it is you actually intend to do on your
|
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computer.
|
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And then don't beat yourself up if you don't do it but the chances are when you get to
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the end of the process you would have what is sometimes called willed, which stands
|
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or what was I looking for.
|
||||
As instead of reading the email and responding to it you click on the link that is interesting
|
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that takes you to a website where you end up buying something you had no intention
|
||||
of buying or checking out time share accommodation in Spain and then at the end of your hour you
|
||||
actually only completed one of the tasks that you were supposed to be doing.
|
||||
And so I think there are also exercises there were at the end you then just look back
|
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at your list and see how much you actually did achieve that you intended to do.
|
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These technologies can distract us.
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The tangents they can take us on can be really exciting but they can also just little by
|
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little, sap away at the original will force that we had to be masters of these things.
|
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So if you feel you're losing mastery over them I think there are little things you can
|
||||
do to I suppose detoxify yourself a bit.
|
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Yeah and that surprised a few of the attendees in that session.
|
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What were a couple of those detox techniques that you were putting forward?
|
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Detoxifying ones that are very physical is that if you've been doing a lot of fingertip
|
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typing on your mobile phone or on your computer is to try and stuck stick your palm of your
|
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hand into some clay and recognize that your hand actually has got almost like a human
|
||||
body on it reflexology to talk about that.
|
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Fingertips are very, very subtle and it's quite scary that apparently now a people are
|
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losing sensual awareness on the end of their fingertips because a bit like craftsmen
|
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it's becoming too hardened from too much typing.
|
||||
Have a go at engaging with the whole palm of your hand and press into it and you'll
|
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realize actually that fingertip communication gets you too much in your head where it's
|
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in a pressing your feet firmly on the ground and your hands firmly into clay.
|
||||
It seems to be more of a whole body thing and for some of you you might find it feels
|
||||
like you're recovering a bit of the self that you lose when your attention is just too
|
||||
much in a tiny bit of your body which is fingertips.
|
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With mobile phones you can almost perch in any position and be tapping away so that's
|
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the problem is yeah I mean you only have to look on I was on a train today.
|
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People are probably unaware that 90% of their train journey is on that device and actually
|
||||
every time they put it away within a second within five seconds ten seconds the damn thing
|
||||
is out again and then may a culprit on this one as well.
|
||||
I think what was interesting when we had that session was your diagnostic phase at the
|
||||
start as we warmed up the attendees well I think you started off you had us just just
|
||||
sitting there with the device in our hand while you were talking and then you said okay
|
||||
put it down put it down on your knee and take your hand off it how long can you last
|
||||
before you feel the overwhelming urge to reach out and either just just touch it or stroke
|
||||
it or pick it up and there was something there about the suggestion that is I guess if
|
||||
you want to reclaim yourself and reclaim your mobile phone it goes back to the days of
|
||||
craftsmen sitting over their tools and they very very much there are lots of pictures
|
||||
of them sitting forward and leaning over it and what tends to happen is that if you are
|
||||
just sitting usually in a slouch position and your mobile phone buzzes and you just pull
|
||||
it towards you you're already behaving as if it's just already attached to your hand
|
||||
like a prosthesis and actually if you want to gain control of it what you actually need
|
||||
to do is put a little bit of will effort sit up sit forward pick the thing up you bring
|
||||
it towards you look at it kind of acknowledge it as a thing before you use it that might
|
||||
sound a bit kind of mad or even you know just clumsy but what it does is it reestablish
|
||||
this separation between you as tall user and the tool itself when you don't do that and
|
||||
you start to behave as if it's just part of your hand again that little bit of consciousness
|
||||
goes and if you're at ease with that it's fine but if you're starting to feel this
|
||||
thing's dominating my life then what you probably have to do is put back in place a bit
|
||||
of controlled separation between you and it so it becomes an it again didn't we have
|
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a few people in that session where you put the question who you know when you wake up
|
||||
in the morning what's the first thing you do and how many people confess that it was
|
||||
pick up the mobile phone and see if they had any messages or check their Twitter or
|
||||
their Facebook before they've even got out of bed some of them yeah that's exactly what
|
||||
they're doing and the clever thing about the mobile phone alarm clock is that it does
|
||||
these nicely probably these days with you know Buddhist temple chat and chimes or something
|
||||
like that you know there's some great apps for that but as you pick it up to switch it off
|
||||
rather cleverly your text messages are already there waiting to be read you know there's
|
||||
a lot of alerts on a screen inviting you before you turn to your loved one and say good
|
||||
morning is to do the more important stuff like you know find out who's responded to you
|
||||
on Twitter it all feels a bit upside down to me do I sound like a grumpy old man here no
|
||||
well it's different difficult for me to tell because I am the master of old
|
||||
Commudjans on this show so yeah you're asking the wrong person I guess I'm saying that
|
||||
because it does sound like you know some older generation saying this stuff scrap and it
|
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really isn't that I think this stuff is so great I think this is what Sherry Terkel points
|
||||
it's so great and it's come in such an avalanche that actually there's a danger in kind of future
|
||||
shock we're not embracing it in a very conscious way and it might be good to put some separation
|
||||
just so we can look at it and actually we might be able to get more and better things out of it
|
||||
if we take a breather and it's interesting what you say about the the avalanche and the future
|
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shock because one of the questions you then put to that group was about who's who's actually
|
||||
comfortable with this I call it obsessive compulsive behavior yeah and and you you asked the
|
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question around the around the room who's who's actually comfortable with this obsessive behavior
|
||||
and the number of people who who some of whom were mature parents you know our age and older
|
||||
who said no they they they hated the fact that they were so dependent on this gadget in their
|
||||
hand and yet they couldn't put it down and that's the paradox of it and that's that's where it's
|
||||
one of those things where we could polarize it and say it's you either use it or you don't or we
|
||||
try the much harder path it's a much more difficult path that requires a bit of effort which is to say
|
||||
how do I reestablish conscious control out of it without actually throwing it out of the window
|
||||
I kind of sat there in that group thinking that maybe I was a little bit strange because I
|
||||
maybe I I went through my obsessive compulsive phase when I was in my 20s with computers and
|
||||
and constantly had something something on the go the phone is entirely different I don't have this
|
||||
I don't well I have this love hate relationship with it because I constantly seem to trip over the
|
||||
bits of software that have been really badly designed I somehow I have got that degree of separation
|
||||
so I don't carry a watch but I've always got the phone on me well nearly always got the phone
|
||||
on me I'll come back to that and I use my my phone as my alarm clock because it's the only the only
|
||||
alarm clock I've got in the house which actually wakes me up I think it's a psychological thing when
|
||||
the phone goes off I really know I have to get up but when I go to bed I put mine on flight mode
|
||||
I don't get any tweets emails or anything else coming through it's purely there is the alarm
|
||||
but the more we sat in that workshop session the more I'm starting to think I was slightly
|
||||
strange and abnormal because I can actually switch the thing off for example yesterday I left
|
||||
the phone in the car twice didn't miss it until I realized that my young lady hadn't been able
|
||||
to text me to say where are you and two days before that I left the phone in the car three times
|
||||
the day before that I actually left it in the house when I went out and had to turn around and come
|
||||
back for it so it is obviously possible to not get quite so attached to these things but it's
|
||||
it's that an acquired skill do you think well there's an expression I heard from a friend Paul
|
||||
Miller called benevolent entanglement and I think that's maybe what you've managed to successfully
|
||||
avoid benevolent entanglement it's worse has always been where your plumber or your builder you
|
||||
know gets you involved in a relationship with them where they keep coming back and charging you
|
||||
more and you keep thanking them for the help they're giving you and it can happen when you you know
|
||||
if you get someone else to design your website but you've got to keep phoning them up every time
|
||||
you want to add a bit of content to it you know that's a bit of an old thing now but you know that
|
||||
that's benevolent entanglement Facebook has got very sticky properties where you know you're drawn
|
||||
back to it all the time and the concept of you are not a gadget is that the Facebook isn't the gadget
|
||||
Facebook has very very cleverly designed something where it's actually the users who behave
|
||||
like gadgets and we've agreed to be locked down to a design on a Facebook page and the inbox is
|
||||
where it is and the color scheme is where it is Facebook knows how we're going to behave it
|
||||
it sets our privacy settings to suit itself and make knowing that we're probably going to find
|
||||
it quite hard to switch them off or even find how to do that Facebook wants us to behave in
|
||||
predictable ways and largely we do now that again might suit you it really doesn't suit me I don't
|
||||
want to be the gadget so if these are tools I want them to be tools I take out use and I put away
|
||||
when I want I don't want to think that I can't ever put them away and the time is fast approaching
|
||||
where these tools are going to be impregnated into us in the form of tattoos in the form of chips
|
||||
under our fingertips and all the science fiction is coming true and turning them off may actually
|
||||
become impossible and again just looking into that future it's for you to decide whether you want
|
||||
it and even if you decide yes I do want it do you want it at the pace it's coming because it's not
|
||||
at the pace that you're determining it's coming at the pace of product life cycles that are designed
|
||||
to I'm going to be honest relieve you as much of your money as possible as more and more regular
|
||||
intervals in the name of innovation isn't that the real driver though it is it is commerce we
|
||||
have laid ourselves at at the feet of commerce and we'll whereas many years ago we used to believe
|
||||
in Kings and Queens and Victoria the Empress of India now it's it's the the the overlordship
|
||||
of the big brands and for me them the sadness of that mediocrity is that some of my closest friends
|
||||
the greatest act of revolution they have ever done and perhaps whatever doing their life has been
|
||||
to hold off getting the latest iPhone if they don't want to be caught up or even worse to switch
|
||||
away from horrible Apple to an Android that's their big high point and you know that's somehow for
|
||||
me smacks is somehow disappointing in a world where the world's falling apart and some some people
|
||||
are saying it is interesting I would suggest that some of the the strongest physical acts of rebellion
|
||||
are still taking in places where this technology isn't as available it's still being used I guess by
|
||||
the planners of it but the revolutionaries are probably not sitting on Facebook for 23 hours a day
|
||||
yeah well that kind of takes takes me off onto a couple of other things that you've you've got on
|
||||
the go you mentioned collusion and I noted that there are parts of your book up on the cats 3000
|
||||
sites yeah the book collusion of mediocrity which I think is a fantastic title I've got I'm
|
||||
really pleased this with this episode of the show I've got two authors who've come up with really
|
||||
good titles because we're going to follow this with Becky Hogg who wrote barefoot into cyberspace
|
||||
but I think the collusion of mediocrity is a fantastic title but that that book is there I say a
|
||||
little bit amorphous and you admit is not exactly complete and may may never be complete yeah I think
|
||||
the nature of it is that I have a paradox which is that the nature of the collusion of mediocrity
|
||||
without spending too much time on it is it's the unspoken kind of agreement between people because
|
||||
sometimes honestly can be uncomfortable so you accept mediocrity because it keeps you in the in a safe
|
||||
zone the thing is that even when you do become honest and people are honest with people I think you
|
||||
just get to another level of collusion and level two of the collusion is what I call forced revelation
|
||||
where these days there's lots and lots of honesty but it becomes an excuse for just being honest
|
||||
and moaning and not actually taking action and I'm worried that the book will just become a level two
|
||||
collusion so what I've done is the book is just evolving actually interestingly online and people
|
||||
are adding to it and I'm adding to it and it might take paper form it's not a problem to get a book
|
||||
like that published but I'm quite up for the idea that you know stories are going to be added to it
|
||||
and so it is kind of evolving amorphously because I'm hoping then it will fly under the radar of
|
||||
its own potential mediocrity that sounded really up its own arse apologies to anyone listening
|
||||
well if you're going to write on mediocrity that is the the trap you have to avoid falling into
|
||||
well just to to bring us almost full circle if if you pardon the pun I don't use that one very
|
||||
often on this show one of the expressions of the the theories that you came out within in
|
||||
learning to dance with spiders was the theatre piece that you mentioned at the beginning text
|
||||
which there was a performance on at the critical instant which which I which I saw and but that
|
||||
I think showed a lot of the people at the conference in a very emotionally engaging way some of
|
||||
the pitfalls of falling into the lap of technology how's how's that played developing now
|
||||
so actually the version you saw was pretty finished at one level it was a play about two people
|
||||
whose relationship in you might say the physical world had started to falter years ago but what
|
||||
they were doing in their routine of work and and texting each other from trains and so on was
|
||||
becoming ever more intimate online on the phone particularly and that's where people get to this
|
||||
place where there are more virtual kisses than real ones and and then little by little you don't
|
||||
notice the decline but what we're just hoping to do with it is the next step and it's a supposed
|
||||
is an experiment in theater is these are part of this plays text conversations between two people
|
||||
that we project onto the wall but we'd like to make it real in the theater that they're actually
|
||||
on real devices texting for real and the possibility that when the audience comes in they're all given
|
||||
a mobile device and they can also follow the text conversations by looking at the screen and
|
||||
looking at the life theater which creates a new challenge that I think there is there in the world
|
||||
what's more interesting to you the the screen or the thing that's before you so it would be a piece
|
||||
of theater that actually tried to mirror the same thing that the characters are on stage have
|
||||
actually got in there in their characters when when does the virtual world service and when does
|
||||
it actually enslave us I guess that's part of it and in the case of text it's a tragedy really
|
||||
because what it is is that people flee into a last-gast for tempered revive their relationships by
|
||||
being more intimate through their fingertips and through the keyboard and I think it's nearly
|
||||
always doomed to failure but I'd really love to hear from anybody anyone listening in to say
|
||||
no it's not this is a new opportunity for us there's a new romantic movement that's going to come
|
||||
through Facebook and mobile phone texting I've yet to be convinced of that oh yeah you haven't
|
||||
you haven't been watching the videos of Facebook weddings on on YouTube then you know I've seen
|
||||
them and you know people have been married in second life and divorced in second life in
|
||||
the virtual world and somebody sued themselves because they found somebody cheating on second life
|
||||
and all of this stuff is again come to come back to Sherry Terkel it's a melting pot where the
|
||||
technological possibilities are running ahead of our consciousness to cope with them wow
|
||||
I don't think I can top that one particularly given that my consciousness generally runs behind
|
||||
everything else at this time of night I'm gonna say thank you very much then in that case
|
||||
I don't think I can top that one and anything that I say after that's going to fall into that
|
||||
collusion of mediocrity so I'm going to quit while we're ahead well it is funny that you know
|
||||
you're interviewing me here on Skype and we're staring into laptops and you know maybe in the
|
||||
past we've met for real okay thank you very much Paul see you again soon thank you very much good night
|
||||
Paul leave his website combines cats 3,000 and rational madness at rationalmadness.wordpress.com
|
||||
where you will also find the ebook the collusion of mediocrity the critical incident
|
||||
unconference for 2012 has been announced on the theme of the eye take a look over the conference
|
||||
plan for this year over at the critical incident website www thecriticalincident.com
|
||||
we've more interviews coming up on the full circle podcast very soon for now I'm Robin
|
||||
Kathleen thank you for listening and goodbye
|
||||
you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does our
|
||||
we are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday and Monday through Friday
|
||||
today's show like all our shows was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself
|
||||
if you ever consider recording a podcast then visit our website to find out how easy it really is
|
||||
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the economical and computer cloud
|
||||
HBR is funded by the binary revolution at binref.com all binref projects are crowd-responsive by
|
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|
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needs on list otherwise stasis today's show is released under a creative comments attribution share
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|
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