New Language

Tim: Some time ago you recommended to me the Podcast “The Great Simplification” which I love to listen to. In the last Episode, Indy Johar, the founder of Dark Matter Labs was a guest.¹ He’s your colleague and a close partner, since you work at DML as a conversational design director.² I loved the language of Indy, how he described his vision of life-enobling economics.³ I guess that for DML,⁴ creating a new language is a key to create new visions for a better future. Could you elaborate on that? 

Martin: Language is something we often discuss at Dark Matter Labs. Especially when someone is new to the organization and overwhelmed with the DM lingo. I know that feeling from when I started at DM and read through tons of papers trying to understand what DM does. I am trained as a communication designer, and for my entire professional life, I have tried to make content easy to understand for my readers. I thought DM did a bad job using terms only a few understand. After two years, my perspective has changed.

language is always the result of a worldview

First, we do not have a mainstream audience but a tiny group of decision-makers worldwide. Changing the worldview of the mainstream takes a lot of time, which we do not have. Second, language is always the result of a worldview. If you want to change from a worldview of extraction to a worldview of care, certain terms do not work anymore, and you have to invent new words, especially if you deal with the violence of our economy. Life-ennobling economics represents a desired shift from an extractive economy to an economy that has an enobled life as an objective. Such a shift would change everything. How we relate to each other and everything on this planet. New paradigm shifts need new languages. Now, after two years at DM, I see a new word I do not understand yet as an invitation to think about a new concept. It makes me question the language I grew up with and how it affects my thinking and doing. 

Footnotes

1. Indy Johar: “The Foundational Challenge: Stewardship, Responsibility, and Designing a New System” https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/147-indy-johar ↩︎
2. At the Conversational Design Studio, we want to develop better conversations with you. What does Conversation Design mean in your context? How can you benefit from our experiences and we from yours? What does Life-Ennobling Design mean? https://cds.darkmatterlabs.org ↩︎
3. LEE is a framework for an inclusive and action-oriented dialogue, building on the foundational wisdom of many brilliant thinkers and movements. https://lee.darkmatterlabs.org/ ↩︎
4. At Dark Matter Labs, we view the interconnected crises of our time as symptoms of a deeper, structural miscoding of our economic systems. We understand these codes to be physical (e.g. biodiversity, energy, labour and materials), structural (e.g. money creation, embedded inequality and private property rights) and psychological (e.g. failure of the imagination). https://darkmatterlabs.org/ ↩︎