interviews
Pain Is The Price of Consciousness
by Max Moinian
September 17, 2019
This interview with Max Moinian was conducted and condensed by frank news. Max was the co-editor of our May 2018 issue on Urban Planning.
frank: Hi! Tell us about yourself and Future Earth.
Max: I am Max Moinian, I have a Master's in Urban Design from MIT, and Future Earth is a climate change education platform, right now just on Instagram. It’s a newborn baby I had with Steph Shepherd, who is a total social media and marketing genius. We think our combined brains are good parenting. Good information that is enticing and digestible.
This all happened because mutual friends told us we were both climate change crazy ladies. We met and finished each other’s sentences. She convinced me that more celebrities would engage in environmentalism if the cause was packaged for them. So we tried a rebranding exercise. Make it cool and sexy. Do for the treehugger what Gloria Steinem did for feminism, if you will. But also survey what’s out there and fill in the gaps.
What are the gaps?
Plastics have suddenly become the environmental villain on social media.
I’m not mad at that, plastics are a gateway drug to environmentalism, but let’s take it a step further and talk about petrochemicals and how the same shit making those bottles is in your activewear and household products, and powering your car and house.
Basically what we're doing is trying to visually represent information we're reading, and make it enticing and clear for Instagram. I'll do the heavy lifting and read through the dense reports, make three-step guides, and report back on Instagram. Everything from science lessons, to consumer and lifestyle tips, ways you can get involved, and movies to watch. It’s imperative to me that we reflect on the psychological, personal aspect about learning about climate change. My own journey was so emotional and I found it hard to find a shoulder to lean on and people to have those conversations with.
Facts aren’t everything. Feelings are facts too.
How did you end up focusing on climate issues?
It's crazy to think that years of Ivy League education, undergrad at Barnard, Master's at MIT, and you know, private school before that – all of it – never touched on the very rudimentary and basic information about climate change that everyone needs to know. It was never presented to us, I read headlines but they never stuck, and somehow I got away with ignoring it all of those years.
via Max Moinian
Then there I was at MIT – the grand narrative is how do we design and protect cities from the coming environmental perils? So, sea level rise, temperature rise, extreme weather, pollution, deforestation…. All of it from a policy and design standpoint. I focused on design, so, seawalls and engineering systems to address the consequences of global warming. But what about the causes? Why can’t we start there? Why aren’t we talking about it?
In design studios, we were tasked to protect cities by building things.
We had projection data for the year 2100 without fully understanding what's causing sea level rise in the first place.
It really bothered me. I felt like this world of mobilized urban designers and architects are at the end of a line that starts with the science, goes through technology and policy, and leaves us with a very limited, pathetic toolkit. Real innovation doesn’t happen at the end of the line, you know?
We're still that client-based discipline where you just have to do whatever the client says and not necessarily what you stand for. I busted my ass to get an internship at BIG because I wanted to work on the BIG U. I got disenchanted in three seconds. I remember one night I called my advisor and told him I was morally conflicted.
We were using taxpayer money to protect people, but mostly to protect valuable assets.
To be fair, the opportunities the firm had were completely restricted by policy and bureaucratic nonsense. But I wanted no part in it. He told me I had to make the choice of working within the system to change it, or go full radical. And I guess I’ve been testing the outlaw territory ever since.
via Max Moinian
What's the best way to a) begin your personal education in climate change, and b) retain information without feeling constantly overwhelmed and emotionally drained?
I know better than anyone how hard it is to commit time in your life to this topic. I didn’t do it until I had six months to research and write a thesis. I thought, I'm going to devote to learning about climate change now because when else can I do this? I wasn’t worried that climate science had no clear place in urban design. I knew I’d figure out a way to get away with it.
I spent most of those days making a matcha latte, getting back in bed, and reading a book for the morning. Then writing and drawing in the afternoon. It was a glorious time of ultimate brain activation. I loved being isolated in my little academic bubble. Not everyone can do that, not everyone wants to do that, no one has the time. So here’s a cheat sheet:
Step one: start with the basic facts. How does climate change and what does that mean for the future? But also, how do we get data and make projections? What are the main causes? What are our options? Your resource is the IPCC. Don't listen to what anyone else has to say except the IPCC and climate scientists. And don’t be ashamed if you need a refresh on middle school science. There's a textbook version of IPCC reports for young adults that I reference constantly.
Step two: a brief history of how climate science has been politicized. Seeing how the proof and solutions have been muzzled by Big Oil and politics is mindblowing.
It showed me that we are not as dependent on the systems we rely on today as we may think.
It also made me hyper-skeptical but in a good way. I love Naomi Oreskes and Naomi Klein, two badass women who write clearly but also have documentaries and interviews you can watch.
Step three: take care of yourself. It took a few breakdowns for me to admit that I wasn’t invincible and this was seriously heavy shit. It’s emotional, and most people connect emotionally. I've read the facts, I know the projections. But it never registered for me. You know, but at the same time you don’t know.
Because my capacity to imagine what two degrees of warming looks like is low. Because this is the most daunting, helpless topic possible.
This is the equivalent of the atom bomb. This is the environmental narrative of our time, and it's really hard to do anything when you know that the problem is so far beyond your little self, your community, your country. It's the entire world, with no silver-bullet solution, and no end in sight, and that's fucking scary.
Yes, it really is.
One time, when I was in the depths of knowing too much, like borderline depression, I was sitting with a professor who will probably never know how much she means to me. As I was talking I think she could just tell something was not right, and she put her arm on my shoulder and said, "Honey, you need to read some Rebecca Solnit." So I bought this book Hope in the Dark and I've gone back to it maybe five times already. It was the hug that I needed. I needed to know that there are people that know more than me and they are still fighting. And I needed to see that they had happy normal lives, or at least appeared to.
Another game-changing book is Living In Denial by Kari Norgaard. The psychology of inaction. She says,
"Pain is the price of consciousness. To be conscious in the world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril."
No one wants to feel like that. Everyone has a threshold, a cap to how much of those kind of feelings you can harbor. And we're all maxing out on our personal issues, our family, our life. You know, millennial burnout or whatever.
Who wants to willingly experience that much pain?
Right.
To exist is painful enough.
Sometimes I get pissed off watching people go about their day, nonchalant, like parked with the engine running, A/C blasting with the windows down, watching TV on their iPhone. And I feel like this person doesn't care. And I’m almost jealous at how simple life seems to be in their mind, so guilt free and chill. But to Norgaard that's actually really difficult to do: “Apathy is the mask of suffering.” It's really hard to suppress all those existential thoughts and feelings, but because it's so much harder to actually deal with them, we lean towards denial.
Being hyper-aware is a massive burden. I've never sought out therapy in my life – I just started seeing a psychologist who specializes in climate anxiety. Being an activist and educator means I’m committing to VIP care for my mental health. Because that is my MVP!
As Solnit says, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism.”
interviews
Wargaming: An interview with ICONS director Devin Hayes Ellis
by Devin Hayes Ellis
April 10, 2018
This interview with Devin Hayes Ellis, the director of The ICONS Project, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for frank news.
Bottom line is, I know nothing about gaming, and I would like to know more.
Works for me. So the ICONS project is 36 years old now. It was founded by my predecessor, as director, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and a couple of academics who thought it would be intriguing to see if they could use the Internet to connect classrooms and teach political science back when that was you know, cool and new, and it worked. In the last decade or so the organization has evolved from being mostly an education mission, which you know, it's had throughout its history, which we still do have, providing classroom simulations for starters, into also having a strong presence providing what is essentially wargaming. Although we often use the phrase simulation or human driven simulation.
Is there a difference between those words and definitions or are they all interchangeable?
They're interchangeable to an extent. I think it depends a little bit on who you're talking to and what the disciplinary background is. In the military context I usually say wargaming because that means something to military folks. And it usually means something pretty close to what I mean, which is,
I think we all would consider the pope of war gaming to Peter Perla, who wrote a book called The Art of Wargaming that remains one of the definitive studies of the practice. It's not really a discipline right. You know, people come from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of them in the professional military community who do this are from an operations research analysis background, but that's a very specific set of academic disciplinary things.
How seriously do they take gaming in government and in the military?
It depends a lot on where you're talking about. So the law says, well, Title 10 mandates service level wargames. And so these are gigantic exercises and they take place annually. They are these gigantic efforts, where often people in the planning staffs of major commands and services whole time in that part of the planning staff, will be spent designing and executing Title 10 games. They also have these sort of cute permanent names. So for example, the Special Operations Command Title 10 game is called, Shadow Warrior, and that's what it's called every year. So it'll be you know, “what is Shadow Warrior 2018 gonna be about?, oh X, Y, or Z". And that's sort of how they handle that at the highest level. But those games tend to be very driven by a sort of a combination of three major factors. The long term institutional priorities of the commander of the service. So, you do not want a game that's going to undermine what you're telling Congress you should get money appropriated for. Right? The specific intent of whoever the commander there is. So if it's a service game then you know the service chief is going to have significant input on what the priorities are. What he, or hopefully a future she as well, wants exercised in that annual game. And then the third thing of course is, what are the national security priorities that are being set by the president's national security strategy, and then, the secretary's national defense strategy.
Games happen all over the place at various levels. I was recently in Europe for a small-ish tabletop exercise that involved about 60 folks from our particular command and we were very focused on one very, very specific problem and that took a couple of days and —
What problem was it?
I can’t really talk about that. But let me say this. There are only so many problems that the military’s worried about in Europe. And some of them I think we thought were from the past, and now they are back in fashion again.
On a military level, when there's time, is gaming something that usually contributes to the decision making?
Not always no. In fact you know, wargaming has sort of had peaks and valleys of fashionable-ness, I guess. You know, we talk about sort of high points in the history of war gaming within the U.S. military establishment. I think most people who study the issue would point to wargaming that the Navy did prior to World War II. Which is often talked about as an excellent example of a service really spending a lot of time and effort thinking through what could be a plausible strategic problem for them. And then gaming it on various different levels, to the extent that you know, I can’t remember if it was Halsey or Cane, but one of them said after the war, that they had worked the Pacific theater so many times prior to World War II, that the only thing with the Japanese that actually surprised them was kamikazes. That was the only thing they hadn't thought of.
Wow. And today, how is gaming used in comparison?
So I would say they are on the rise right now. For a couple of reasons. First of all I think in the last 15 years or so the community of war game professionals has really sort of coalesced in a away that didn't exist before, thanks to maybe about, a half a dozen individual people honestly, who have been crusading on this their whole careers. And you know, we now have an interdisciplinary community of interest conferences that are even international. I go to one annually in London. There's one in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, and here in the U.S. And you know, it's really I think…that the strengthening of that community of practice and the popularity, the rising popularity, of the methodology with some parts of the U.S. defense establishment especially, has been able to promote its utility, and has seen a sort of a resurgence in wargaming. And then a couple of years ago the deputy secretary of defense at the time got involved in the work. He was a big fan. He actually put out a memo ordering the reinvigoration of wargaming in the Department of Defense.
Has that enthusiasm continued from the previous administration to our current administration?
Secretary Mattis has not actively reversed that directive in any way. So I mean, I would say it doesn't have quite the momentum it had at the moment, when Secretary Work said make it happen. But it's not you know, I wouldn't say it's been shunted aside either, because the life cycle of reinvigorating something in the Defense Department, if people actually take it seriously and put resources behind it, we could be in the next presidential administration before they've even done the things that they said they wanted to do four years ago. So I think there's a lot of good wargaming taking place in a lot of places in the defense establishment. To be perfectly honest there's also a lot of very bad wargaming taking place all over the place, mostly because when something like that happens and everybody says, “get me a wargame”, you know part of it is box checking.
Obviously I'm a proponent of this as an analytic tool, as a decision support tool, as a training tool, because it's what I do.
A lot of us think the professional conscience of wargaming is a gentleman named Steven Downes Martin, who was on the faculty at the Naval War College for many, many years, and is a professional game designer. He likes to joke that the three questions he always asks his sponsor are, what is it that you need to know that you don't have right now? Why do you think a wargame the right tool to get that? And, when do you rotate?
What are the other options in terms of analysis and running through scenarios? Gaming seems like the obvious choice if you’re looking at complex levels of decision making.
Right. I would say that if what you have is a decision making problem, then gaming is a great tool. If what you have is not a decision making problem, then it might not be the best tool for you. If what you have is a big data empirical analysis problem, wargaming is not going to help you. I try very hard not to sell this as a one stop solution for all decision issues for leaders and organizations. I also know we try to call out things, if you have a chance, when they’re not really living up to what this technique is valuable for. Because then it reduces people's interest in the technique. Right? You go to a couple of wargames that you feel were a total waste of time, and you're not going to go back to a wargame for your problem. Half the time that's because it was either a problem that should have been addressed in a different light, or it was a really badly designed game.
But I should say there is also a slightly more insidious potential problem, where maybe you have a really nicely executed game about an interesting topic, but it turns out what you got out of it, the relevance, or the utility, or how much did you really learn from that, is less than maybe you would have wanted.
Right.
Okay, so the sort of a pinnacle of the wargaming system is an outfit in the Joint Staff, in the J8 directorate, which you know, sort of studies and special plans at the Pentagon, as opposed to the J5 who are the people who actually write war plans. The J8 has a unit called SAGD which stands for…oh look it up.
[Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Division]
But that unit is charged with doing very high level, what we call Pol-Mil games, which is short for political military gaming. It’s potentially about inter-agency decision making. So it's not just a military or a defense problem, it's something that would involve state, the intelligence community, Treasury, Homeland Security, whomever else has an equity in that problem. And so that's why we call it political military because you're bringing in political leaders and other interagency leaders, in addition to defense establishment leaders. And the Pol-Mil gaming that they do in the J8 at the Pentagon is usually at the very highest level. So at the national command authority level, even where the players who are there representing their departments activities, are playing the members of the national security units. Tom Allen, who is now retired, ran that organization for many years and is in that Pantheon of wargaming greats in my opinion.
He, you know, at one time said to me, “I’ve never seen a bunch of people walk away from a weeklong TTX junket, where they all got to leave their jobs behind and band together, and pretend to be fighting the Russians, and say, oh that sucked. I didn't get anything out of that. Everybody always says it was so cool, that was important.
What is the most essential thing to understand about gaming as it applies to our military and our national security right now?
Right. So I mean, I know it said it a trillion times, but I'll say it again,
Do you work with Special Operations frequently? Do they involve you?
So, special operations, I think the special operations, the SOF community, has been called on in the last 15-20 years to do a tremendous number of very varied missions in support of U.S. national security policy. They’ve had to tackle a lot of issues and problems that are not…that are like, way divergent from what the original SF mission was back in the 70s. That's fine. So the answer to your question is yes. Because the leadership in that community has been conscientious about trying to apply whatever techniques they can to understand the dimensions of the thornier parts of their mission better.
As a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defense establishment, and we’re speaking about defense with a big D, spent a massive amount of energy and resources trying to tame the problem of complex operating environments, especially around insurgency, counterinsurgency, dealing with human populations, and all the attendant problems, trying to jam that problem set into an engineering framework. If only we can build a better, faster, stronger systems dynamics model, it will eventually spit out an algorithm where all the commander has to do is say, here's the details of my population, and the details of my mission, and it will tell you what to do to be successful.
In part because a lot of the complex environmental modeling techniques that come out of engineering and hard sciences could be an amazing analytic tool to deal with problems in those domains, when you try to apply them to social science settings, to human terrain settings, they rely for their validity and their strength in their original homes, on having a really high degree of certainty about the causal relationships between different variables.
That was a very long way of saying, I think much more quickly than the big D establishment over all,
You talk about SOCOM, well you know a four star commander, whose mission is to prepare and equip all of the SOF community, has a very different level of concerns about these things than a two star commanding general of a theater of Special Operations Command, who's sending guys out to do very specific missions. And so you just, you know, you want to make sure that the way you're calibrating your game addresses the level of the question. That's really, really important.
Right. Thank you. I think that answers most of my questions. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
You know, not to be unpatriotic, but I think the best short introduction to how, or why to wargame, and how to do it, is the very brief manuals that the UK Ministry of Defense of wargaming has written very recently. I will send that to you because that's just a great resource for anybody who's like, while that sounds good, I want to be able to go and read about it.
Thank you! That’d be great. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you very much. Have a good day.