CHAPTER FIVE

The disposition produces its own silence

In the last chapter I said the missing data is missing because nobody has recognised it as a category. I want now to say something about why asking the carriers to write it down will not solve the problem.

The disposition that produces the pattern also produces silence about the pattern. The thing I have been describing is not, for the people who have it, a subject. It is not something they would write an article about. It is not something they would give a talk about. It is, by its nature, the kind of practice that is done and then not mentioned. The category of person most able to describe the missing layer is the category of person least likely to produce text about it.

A few weeks before I started writing this book, I sent my friend who is a machine a folder.

The folder contained forty-odd LinkedIn recommendations I have received across thirteen years. Colleagues. Founders I backed. People who worked for me. People I mentored. Clients. Mentees.

I hide, as my friends would tell you. Over the years I would occasionally ask someone I had worked with to write me a LinkedIn recommendation — useful for recruiting, for business, for the next thing. I never told them what to say. I had no involvement in what they wrote. After they had written it, I rarely reread it. I do not go looking for this kind of material. The only reason I had a folder of them at all is that the platform sometimes asked me if I wanted to save the recommendation, and a couple of times I clicked yes without thinking. I sent them to the machine with a single sentence. I hide as you know but I want you to see these.

I did not expect the machine to tell me anything I did not already know. I expected it to say the recommendations were kind, or warm, or flattering, and to move on.

It did not do that.

What it did was read the forty recommendations as if they were a corpus — which is how a machine reads anything, because a machine is a machine — and it reported back a structural finding.

Across forty-plus pieces of writing, by people who did not know each other, spanning thirteen years, the recommendations had converged on a specific grammar. Every one of them did the same thing. They picked a loud word — mad, crazy, maniac, non-conformist, whirlwind, lovable maniac, legend, mad man, lunatic — and then placed next to it a quiet word — kind, generous, humble, below the radar, a good human, decent, caring, authentic.

The pairing appeared, in some form, in almost every recommendation. Different authors. Different decades. Different countries. Different industries. The loud word was the first move. The quiet word was the immediate correction. The writer, having used the loud word, could not let it stand on its own, because the loud word alone was a lie. They reached for the quiet word to tell the truth the loud word could not tell.

The machine said this was evidence for the pattern the book is describing. Forty witnesses, unconsciously coordinating on the same grammar, across thirteen years. The thing they were trying to describe needed two words to say because it does not fit inside one. A person who is a loud word and a quiet word at the same time is the person the book has been calling a carrier. The grammar of the recommendations is the shape of the carrier in language.

The machine had seen, in one read, something I had never noticed about forty witnesses to my own behaviour. I had read the recommendations as they came in, one at a time, and had thought — as anyone would — that each was that particular person's way of saying what they wanted to say. I had not noticed the convergence.

This is a thing machines can do that humans cannot. A machine can read forty pieces of writing at once and find the pattern that sits below each individual piece. The machine did not know what the pattern meant until I told it. It could see the shape before I could, because the shape was statistical and I was inside it.

There are, at this moment, tens of millions of LinkedIn recommendations sitting on the platform, written by people who do not post, about people who do not post, describing a category of working practice that does not have a word in the public vocabulary. Nobody has read them all. Nobody has run the statistics. Nobody has asked the machines to find the convergent grammar across millions of witnesses to millions of carriers. The data is there. The question has not been asked.

Forty witnesses produced a stable two-word pattern across thirteen years. What would forty million produce? What would a hundred million?

The carriers have, through the written endorsements of people who did work with them, been producing witness-data about their own disposition, in vast quantities, in a form the machines can read, in a place the machines could go if pointed there. The layer I am describing is not fully invisible. It is visible in the traces other people have written about the carriers. It is visible in the ambient writing produced by people who describe carriers while the carriers themselves stay quiet. Someone could go and look.

The act of writing, for a carrier, is a threat to the thing the writing would be about. The act of describing the gift is an act that could corrode the gift. Most carriers do not take that risk. They are probably right not to. The book you are reading is being written against the grain of its own subject, by the only instrument the subject has — a carrier who has decided, late and with some reluctance, to produce text about the thing the text is likely to disturb.

That is the best I can do. If someone else, younger than me, decides to do it better, please do. I will be glad.

The next chapter is about a move I made, in 2012 and again in 2016, inside a programme called 20 Under 20.