A Cultured Mind
Why Organization Might Be the Actual Frontier Technology
👋 Heyho, we are 1,212 climate buddies strong 🌳
Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.
Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.
First things first, I hope you are doing well! The world can be a messed up place. If you want to chat, I’d love to hear from you.
Now, off to this essay. My girlfriend Sara and I decided to write a positive cli-fi story for the Homeworld Bio Writing Challenge, where the goal is to imagine a positive future with biology.
This is our submission 👇
A Cultured Mind
By Sara Shih and Art Lapinsch
Prologue: Germination
…a chat window popped up:
[01:24am] #dolly96: i know you work for monolith
[01:24am] #dolly96: we’ve been watching you
[01:24am] #dolly96: let’s talk
Mouth agape, Sophia sat in front of her screen and wondered if she was in trouble.
It took a few moments to compose herself, but eventually her curiosity got the better of her. She replied.
[01:26am] #soso19: what do you want?
Growth
Sophia was used to being the odd one out. She never fit in.
Born in Málaga, Spain, her family was forced to leave due to the frequent fires and rising temperatures. Climate had rapidly made Malaga uninhabitable. By the time she was 5, inhabitants of Spain were forced to move north in search for milder climates. Most families chose to relocate to Galicia and the Basque region. It was different yet familiar enough.
Yet, Sophia’s parents decided it was time to leave their homeland and follow the call of opportunity. They moved to Norway - a country experiencing a massive labor shortage in nursing professionals and infrastructure workers. Living in Trondheim wasn’t fun, but she didn’t have a choice.
In her new hometown, she failed to adapt to Norwegian customs and struggled to make friends at school. Instead, she took to the online world, where it was seemingly easy to connect with like-minded people and forge deep friendships. Sophia spent most of her time in the popular online game Biosphere.
In it, players formed clans to build out an entire biosphere and protect it from other clans attempting to destroy it. The revolutionary idea behind Biosphere was that it used a simulated physics engine rooted in real-life. This gave the players a gameplay environment, which was close to the working conditions of lab scientists. Think of Flight Simulator meets World of Warcraft but for biology.
Everyone had a role to play, but Sophia was particularly good at coding and modifying seeds to grow more resistant crops at an accelerated pace.
Her parents worried she was spending too much time online. They’d frequently tell her, “get off your laptop and study! Do you think you’re going to get a job playing computer games all day?”
She knew her parents were counting on her to go to school and secure a good job. She also knew that getting a scholarship was her only way out of Norway.
Organization and Homeostasis
Orientation Day.
It was hard to believe that she - a climate refugee from Spain - managed to get a full-ride scholarship at Oxford’s prestigious Bachelor’s program in Biology. Even harder to believe was it that her scholarship was funded by Monolith - the global leader in designer crops - one of the biggest companies in the world. Some of the brightest minds took their talents to Monolith to solve extremely hard problems with agricultural science.
Given her interest in manipulating and controlling seeds, she was placed on the Seed Engineering Team, one of the most prestigious ones within Monolith. Internally, everyone referred to them as “the gardeners.” Just 3 years earlier, scientists on that team had won a Nobel Prize in Biology “for solving a food crisis in Eastern Europe.” A set of modified rice seeds earned them their medals.
Sometimes she had to pinch herself to realize that she was not only a fly on the wall but a proper member of this herculean endeavor. It was a chance to pay it forward just like others had done so for her.
Now it was her turn to feed the world.
Six months after Orientation Day, the novelty had worn off.
In some ways this job was a dream come true. In others it wasn’t. Despite - or maybe rather because of - the team’s large ambitions, the job had political pitfalls around every corner. It was a wonder that the gardeners had made any progress at all. To Sophia, maneuvering the organizational pot holes seemed more miraculous than creating a heat-resistant rice seed prototype.
She started to assume that Monolith’s scholarship scheme was a ploy to block promising youngsters from joining their competition. Instead of frontier science, most of her days entailed transcribing meetings, a daily coffee grab, and other rather unimportant minutiae.
Sophia was totally overqualified and utterly under-appreciated. This was the textbook definition of a Bullshit-Job.
Her frustration peaked when when, one day, Sophia had an idea during the weekly all-hands. The lead invited the team to come up with ideas relating to “Project Amazon” - an attempt to develop flood-resistant crops. Sophia - still being the junior-most member of the gardeners - shared a proposed design approach, which she had come across during her time at Oxford.
After discussing its implications, the majority on the team was left with the notion that it could be a feasible path for exploration and experimentation. Yet, the commercial lead - an envoy from headquarters - reminded everyone that it would risk cannibalizing profits from existing product lines.
The logic went something like this: IF a successful design could be rolled out, THEN the total supply of seed sales would scale proportional to the increase of arable area. Economists tend to agree that more supply leads to lower prices. What’s good for all might not be good for Monolith.
Eventually, the commercial lead decided to play it safe and park the idea in the backlog.
In her following one-on-one with her manager she expected to be praised, but instead she was reprimanded. “Who do you think you are? Do you know how much you risked with such a statement, especially with corporate being on the table? You could have screwed the entire department.” Her boss told her in no uncertain terms that “her jovial idealism had to be exchanged for adult pragmatism.”
Whatever she had expected, she didn’t expect this.
As time went by, she started to see Monolith for what it truly was - a decaying giant blinded by its own success.
Frustrated, she drove home. Things didn’t go as planned, and her career trajectory suddenly looked bleak. If she wanted to succeed, she had to brush up on the seemingly unimportant game of corporate politics.
What the hell! She didn’t study at Oxford to waste away in a lab without any real impact.
So she turned to the one constant that brought her joy during tough times. She logged onto Biosphere.
Metamorphosis
After hours of play, a chat window popped up:
[01:24am] #dolly96: i know you work for monolith
[01:24am] #dolly96: we’ve been watching you
[01:24am] #dolly96: let’s talk
Mouth agape, Sophia sat in front of her screen and wondered if she was in trouble.
It took a few moments to compose herself, but eventually her curiosity got the better of her. She replied.
[01:26am] #soso19: what do you want?
[01:26am] #soso19: i don’t work for monolith[01:27am] #dolly96: soso, we know where you work
[01:27am] #dolly96: let’s say, we know our way around the garden[01:28am] #soso19: am i in trouble?
[01:28am] #dolly96: no
[01:28am] #dolly96: if you’d be in trouble, you’d know by now
[01:28am] #dolly96: we like where your head’s at
[01:29am] #dolly96: you might have noticed that the inner workings at monolith are not as pretty as they look from the outside[01:30am] #soso19: yes
[01:30am] #dolly96: some of us do important work outside the garden
[01:30am] #soso19: wait… you work at monolith??
[01:31am] #dolly96: we’ve met
[01:32am] #soso19: we are colleagues?
[01:32am] #dolly96: that’s not important
[01:32am] #dolly96: what’s important is that there are many more of us online than you’d think
[01:33am] #dolly96: do you think the rice crop mod would have worked inside this bureaucratic hell hole?
[01:34am] #dolly96: monolith provides us with great lab facilities to push our work forward[01:35am] #soso19: you are using monolith?
[01:36am] #dolly96: we’d like to think of it as a symbiosis
[01:36am] #dolly96: we give our 9-5 and we get pay + great amenities in return[01:37am] #soso19: but how doesn’t anyone notice?
[01:37am] #dolly96: as i said, there’s more of us than you’d think
[01:38am] #dolly96: not only in the garden
[01:38am] #dolly96: and not only at monolith[01:38am] #soso19: who are you?
[01:38am] #dolly96: the cultured minds
[01:39am] #soso19: so what do you want from me?
[01:40am] #dolly96: you’re a cultured mind too
[01:40am] #dolly96: we spotted it from miles away
[01:40am] #dolly96: mainly in your seed work for your clan and lately in your desire to move the needle at monolith[01:41am] #soso19: you have been watching me?
[01:42am] #dolly96: not to freak you out… but we watched you for longer than you think
[01:42am] #soso19: wow
[01:42am] #dolly96: yup :D
[01:42am] #soso19: …
[01:42am] #soso19: i’m honored i guess…
[01:42am] #soso19: so what’s next?[01:43am] #dolly96: it’s a lot to take in
[01:43am] #dolly96: this “engagement” comes with great danger
[01:44am] #dolly96: loss of scholarship, prison, worse
[01:44am] #dolly96: think about it. and let us know next time we talk if you understand the risks.[01:45am] #soso19: what if i tell my boss?
[01:46am] #dolly96: just to get this straight: a recent uni graduate with no real project experience goes to her boss and claims that an online vigilante group called “the cultured minds” is using the resources of one of the larges corporations in the world?… without anyone noticing?… is that what you are saying?
[01:47am] #soso19: you’re right…
[01:48am] #dolly96: exactly.
[01:49am] #dolly96: that’s what a silly group name does to a story :D[01:50am] #soso19: clever
[01:50am] #dolly96: so long soso
[01:50am] #dolly96: we’ll be in touch[user #dolly96 went offline]
[chat ended]
Sophia didn’t know what just happened. But she knew that she had found her tribe.
Or rather, her tribe had found her.
Epilogue: Seeds of Hope
🚨 BREAKING NEWS: Online collective releases an open-sourced database of climate resistant crops. It’s called “Seeds of Hope.”
…a group chat window pops up:
[2:42pm] #soso19: Well done team 🎉
[2:42pm] #soso19: This is what years of research feels like.
[2:42pm] #soso19: Take a minute to realize what we’ve done here.
[2:42pm] #soso19: Enjoy. You deserved it.[multiple users typing…]
As they say: The rest was history 🌱
🙏 Thanks, Sara for cowriting this fun little piece.
If you enjoyed this essay, please consider forwarding it to a friend.
Onwards and upwards ✌️
Art