Category: Commentary

A hurricane is approaching my home. This is not good. But I can’t help but be moved by the way people rise to such occassions.

All across my neighborhood, people were offering help and talking with each other. People I’ve never seen or talked to. In my experience, these storms bring the best out of people.

“Software is eating the world.”

A famous tech investor made this his thesis years ago, and it has proven prescient.

Still, decades into the eating of the world, there remain uneaten experiences, in between the layered folds of software.

When you discover a driving route no maps app will show you and cleverly navigate around thousands who are fully plugged in to the web, it’s a delightful reminder that not everything has been nor ever will be eaten by software.

Software is wonderful. It has improved life in myriad ways. But there’s still delight in the analog world. Here’s to those uneaten pockets! Find them and enjoy them.

I live far from my home state of Michigan. There are almost no fellow Michigan sports fans near me. Yet as the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions are putting together impressive seasons, I feel completely immersed in the Michigan sports community.

Each day, I can dip into a stream of ever-flowing conversations, jokes, highlights, and complaints about these teams with others who love them and grew up with them just like me. I get to step into a Detroit sports bar any time of the day.

Before games, I read scouting reports and predictions. After games I chat about plays or press conferences. I share joy, pain, and everything in between in real time and after the fact.

This was not possible before social media. Sports Twitter is my favorite Twitter (along with parody sports Twitter), and the last few months as the underdog Tigers have made an historic run, I’ve felt completely immersed in the community of fans. We are in this together!

A 30 second video of a stadium or sports bar full of fans give me the emotional charge of being where I cannot. All the chatter, and ability to rewatch plays and clips of locker room celebrations creates an orbit of fans, held together not by geography but by love for the game and the team.

This is an unmitigated good in my life! I love sports and being able to participate in the grand storylines and heroic metaphors with others across the globe.

Thanks social media!

I noticed something in the airport bathroom.

I’ve seen the little rubber anti-splashback discs in the bottom of urinals thousands of times, but for some reason it struck me this time: somewhere, there are designers modeling and testing theses, and factories producing them.

There must be quite a few, because I have seen endless variety of shapes, colors, and brand logos. There is apparently a robust industry dedicated to creating small objects whose sole purpose is to reduce a bit of messiness at the urinal.

Bathrooms don’t need these to function. They are not necessities. A very poor or barbarous society wouldn’t give them a thought. But they make the experience a little bit better. And they are ubiquitous.

A smiled at the thought that somewhere, someone was thinking about how to better manufacture these little things. Without any conscious effort on my part, I get to experience a slightly more civilized society.

I have done daily writing and other challenges on and off for 15 years. It’s always a beneficial experience.

I decided yesterday to start a new one. For the month of October, I’m going to publish a post every day about something good in the world.

There’s no shortage of bad news and scary world events. If we don’t train ourselves to see all the good around us, we will begin to see only darkness.

In an effort to not allow the darkening of my own eyes, I’m kicking off this daily positive post challenge.

Well this is pretty crazy. I’m now the CEO of OpenEd, a company founded 15 years ago and operating under the name My Tech High until today.

Matt and Amy Bowman founded this company to help homeschool families who needed some structure, resources, curriculum options, community, and even things like college credits, but who also need flexibility over schedule, the time and place of learning, and what tools and approaches work best.

They started with 92 students in Utah, creating a partnership with a charter school there. Through My Tech High (ahem, OpenEd) these homeschoolers would be enrolled as virtual students with the school, build a schedule that included the basic state requirements, but allowed maximum flexibility on the rest, and access to dozens of the best curriculum providers on the OpenEd platform as well as in-person providers in their community – all at no cost to them.

There’s a reason the program grew and is now 12,000+ students strong in multiple states.

I first met Matt nearly a decade ago, shortly after founding Praxis, my own alternative education company (in this case, a college alternative). We collaborated and kept-up over the years, as fellow travelers and kindred spirits in the quest to bring more freedom to education.

After selling Praxis, starting Crash (an early job-seeker platform that never got a large enough market share to justify the investment we raised) and eventually converting it to a media company and selling it, I was at a weird place in my career. I’d spent nearly 15 years working in and around education in some form or another. I was tired, a little burnt out, and unsure what was next.

I knew I wanted to build more companies, and education was still a passion. But I decided to take a few years doing fractional CMO work while I planned the next move.

My old friend Jared Fuller came along and convinced me that what I really wanted to do was help him start a media company in the B2B software world. So we started PartnerHacker, got acquired by Reveal in less than a year, built the Nearbound brand and movement, and then got acquired again. All in just two and a half years.

It was an amazing challenge and experience. I was a fish out of water in many ways, but I learned a ton and had amazing success.

And the timing was crazy.

Just before the second merger, which provided a natural opportunity for Jared and I to exit the business, Matt Bowman emailed me out of the blue and asked to chat. He told me he was ready to hand over the reins of My Tech High, and wanted to know if I was interested. Jared and I did some contract work with them, got to really see and feel the company, the team, and the customers and we fell in love.

So here we are. I’m back in education and couldn’t be more excited.

Jared is joining me as COO, and we brought over some great team members from other ventures – Ela Richmond, Alex Hernandez, Charlie Diest, Dave Wasmer.

OpenEd is more than a company. It is a movement.

We want to help give every parent every educational option. Private, public, homeschool, unschool, co-op, microschool, virtual, physical, part-time, full-time; each of these are tools in a parent’s toolkit. There’s no need to feel crammed or confined to one. I have utilized just about every one of these for my own kids. That is the future. That is where education is going. It’s opening up. The walls are coming down.

We currently offer our district partnership model in Utah and Oregon, and are actively looking for districts and charters in other states into which we can expand.

We also offer some incredibly unique stand-alone courses in tech and entrepreneurship that anyone can buy.

We are actively looking at additional models and methods to support the opening up of education. We are revamping our software platform, exploring microschool and tutorial partnerships, the burgeoning world of ESAs, and more.

But as I said, it’s not about our offerings as much as this movement.

That’s why I’m most excited about the launch of the OpenEd Daily, a quick, punchy morning email newsletter for anyone and everyone interested in an open education. We also have a weekly podcast, and you’ll see a lot of activity from us on social.

Join the movement, and let’s open up education for every learner!

A few links:
OpenEd homepage, where you can (and should) sign-up for the newsletter!
The OpenEd strategic narrative deck
The OpenEd store where you can buy a la carte courses in tech and entrepreneurship

The idea of freedom or choice is often mistaken for lack of structure or constraint.

Structure and constraint are necessary to function. They are the foundation from which deviation and surprise are possible, like jazz musicians improvising on the simple structure of a known theme.

Good structures and constraints tend to be simple and live at the bottom of the stack, so to speak. They provide a foundation and lots of experimentation is possible on top of them.

So what does it mean when I advocate for freedom and choice, if I’m acknowledging the need for structure and constraint?

The freedom to choose your structure. The ability to opt-in to existing constraints or create your own that you and others can opt-in to.

The deadly form of constraint or structure is one imposed from on high by a single source of power. They will become corrupt and draw corruption around them. They will kill vital feedback loops, innovation, experimentation, discovery, and knowledge. They will get more and more detailed and far reaching in the structure they impose, turning it from a stable base to a chaotic bureaucracy.

This is always and everywhere inevitable when people have the power to impose constraints on others against their will (with the partial exception of parenthood, which ought to be a process of slowly transferring the imposition of constraints from the parent to the child until the child is able to assume it fully). See Public Choice Theory and all of history for proof.

So in rejecting the imposition of constraint and structure from the outside, do not forget to establish it from the inside. Any area in which you are free from external constraint, you should be choosing and crafting and doing your best to stick to your own constraints, or opting in to those created by others.

If you attempt to operate without constraints, you do not end up unconstrained. You end up in bondage to unspoken, dark, shadowy constraints like depression, lack of ambition, lack of confidence, sloth, gluttony, lust, and all the other chains of hell.

Constraints are your weapons and armor against these forces. Pick up the well-established ones that fit you, and craft new ones as needed.

The power of choice is to choose your own constraints and create your own structure.

When Gehazi miraculously saw the army of angels, he was seeing what Elisha always saw. Angels are always there, those of us who are not prophets only rarely have the capacity to see them.

The same is true of hearing.

The voice of God spoke the world into existence. His voice maintains it. The Psalmist says God is his song. Zephaniah prophesies that God rejoices over us with singing.

Creation reverberates with the song of God.

This casts a new light on the idea of distraction. Turn on any news channel. You will immediately be hit with noise. Literal and figurative dissonance, disharmony, drowning out the beautiful background harmonies emanating from heaven.

If we are exposed to enough noise long enough, even silence won’t be enough to open our ears to the music. We have to relearn, and redevelop the faculty for true hearing.

Remind yourself. Stop and listen to the song of God which is being sung over you even in this very moment.

Return to the land you’re from

To see what it’s become

If it’s changed

And now feels strange

Have you lost, or won?

It’s hard to live without regret and also learn from mistakes.

Regret is backward looking and slows life down. The what ifs are endless and unproductive.

Yet we all make sub-optimal choices, and to learn from them, we’ve gotta think about why and how.

I’ve not yet found a great way to do both.

I’ve only ever had three times in my life where I wonder if I exited a situation too soon.

I’m a big believer in living free, and changing your situation if it doesn’t serve you. This has been an amazing orientation for my life, and benefited me in more ways than I can count.

But as I’ve gotten older, and especially with raising kids, I have had to expand my time horizon when it comes to how long to put up with sub-optimal situations. Sometimes sticking it out and making the most really are best.

I’m still trying to learn that.

I’m not fickle or disloyal, but a little too up for a big new adventure. A few times, that’s blinded me to ways I needed to stay the course.

Family road trip

Oh how the emotions flip

Hope they get a grip

One of the most popular types of social media post is the type that chastises people for being too outraged for one thing and not outraged enough for another.

This is a losing battle.

Outrage is exhausting. Fighting about outrage is equally exhausting. Trying to figure out whether and to what extent to be outraged about what is even more exhausting.

The reality is, everyone is correct.

We are always inappropriately outraged. I get too upset by my own small inconveniences, and not upset enough about the suffering of others. I never have enough information or empathy to properly order my outrage quotient. This is all true. And it always will be true.

Don’t worry about whether others are outraged at the right things. They aren’t. Neither are you.

Put down the opinions and pick up your cross.

There is a lot of worry over the role of technology in our lives, where it comes from, and where it might lead.

I do not disagree that technology may be originally inspired by dark forces, or that we are unprepared to deal wisely with a high-tech world and it might lead to our spiritual or physical destruction.

I do not disagree that technology has a pull that can turn us into slaves of the great disembodied machine, and our behavior can begin to look like the worship of some dark deity.

I do not disagree that there are some who willfully seek to serve this deity, attempting to usher in “entities” that can think for us and run our lives in some panopticon dystopian mass-factory control grid.

But those who start on a narrative like the above usually forget the danger on the other side.

They go all-in for more touching grass, more sunshine, more time in the woods, more rural ideals. These are good practical antidotes to too much technocratic city life, but as spiritual ends, they have the same danger as technology.

The “return to nature” is no less a threat to humans fulfilling our unique human nature as the techno utopia. Technology is not a good god, but neither is nature. Both wish to have us in their grasp. Neither want us in our rightful place, free beings who wield them and master them, redeeming them and bending them to the will of He in whose image we were created.

One way to tell when you are in danger is whether your motivation is primarily reactionary. If the draw to nature is rooted more in anger at technology than love of creation, you are playing on the enemy’s terms. The warring demons of technology and nature each want you to take their side. The one whom they serve just wants you to take a side – any side.

Entering into an antagonistic relationship with nature or technology, and by extension with those who are fans of either, means you are in the devil’s territory.

Picking one as the ultimate goal means the same. Both are false idols.

The pursuit of technology above all else ends at brains in jars.

The rejection of tech and pursuit of nature above all else ends at howling naked in the woods.

One wholly rejects the animal part of human nature. The other embraces it at the expense of our divine nature.

Christians should have a different orientation to both. We needn’t get caught in the battle between two false gods. We needn’t feel the persistent tension between screen time and time in nature. We needn’t be driven by fear.

We are the ones given dominion over nature, and over the tools we can derive from it and use to help us master it.

Even if false gods inspired technology before we were ready to handle it, through Christ it is redeemed. (He redeemed even that vile technology of torture and death, the cross.)

We must reject the god of technology and its promise to make us gods. It is a false hope.

We must also reject the god of nature and its promise to free us from the machine and return us to the innocence of the animal.

We are something else. We are image bearers of God Himself. We are appointed to rule justly over this domain, bringing all things into His service.

I just watched a movie called “Missing” with the kids last night. It was the greatest ad for Apple products I’ve ever seen.

It was a unique, generally interesting and well-paced crime mystery story, where everything happens on the screen of a device. Security cameras, laptops, phones, watches; the entire thing unfolds through the (literal) lens of devices.

The crime gets solved using internet sleuthing and digital tools. A Facetime to a friend to have them find an Instagram photo leads to a Siri voice command to save the protagonist.

I have no idea if Apple had any hand in making this movie, but if they didn’t, they should have! It’s a fun story and doesn’t feel like forced product placement, because the entire plot is about using digital tools in unique ways in a high stakes environment to save the day.

A story built as an ad from the ground up actually works better than cramming a product into an existing story.

I’d love to see more of this. I can’t wait for the movie about saving the world with nothing but spreadsheets.