Zoe - I don’t know if you want me to respond to you or not, and there’s a lot I need to consider, but I do want to say that I’m so, so sorry. However this turns out for me or Leverage, I think it was good that you wrote this essay and spoke out about your experience.
It’s going to take me a while to figure out everything that went wrong, and what I did wrong, because clearly something really bad happened to you, and it is in some way my fault. In terms of what went wrong on the project, one throughline I can see was arrogance, especially my arrogance, which affected so many of the choices we made. We dismissed a lot of the actually useful advice and tools and methods from more typical sources, and it seems that blocking out society made room for extreme and harmful narratives that should have been tempered by a lot more reality. It’s terrible that you felt like your funding, or ability to rest, or take time off, or choose how to interact with your own mind were compromised by Leverage’s narratives, including my own. I totally did not expect this, or the negative effects you experienced after leaving, though maybe I would have, had I not narrowed my attention and basically gotten way too stuck in theoryland.
I agree with you that we shouldn’t skip steps. I’ve updated accordingly. Again I’m truly sorry. I really wanted your experience on the project to be good.
I appreciate this too. I think this form of push-back, is a potentially highly-productive one.
I may need to think for a bit about how to respond? But it seemed worth expressing my appreciation for it, first.