It started with a conversation

Walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago in early December, 2018, I was shaking off the frigid drizzle on my way to meet a longtime friend and consigliere Jessica Clark. She was in town from Philly for some conference. Over many years our paths had crossed dozens of times, through various projects, funders, convenings and interests like journalism, technology, social impact, research and futurism. 

She was a rare person I could connect with who worked at the intersections of too many fields to list at a dinner party without sounding annoying or crazy. Like me, she’d started her own company because she just didn’t fit inside any one organization. Meeting up with Jessica always produced pages worth of notes and ideas to follow up on. “Check out this funder. Have you heard of this artist? I’ll send you this paper. Do you know this person? I’ll connect you.” This was always the ping pong of our meetings. It’s fitting that Jessica’s company is called “Dot Connector Studio.” 

I remember this particular meeting vividly, not because the waiter at the restaurant we met at was nowhere to be found, or because the fries were limp and drinks were weak. But because in that conversation Jessica provided the skeleton key of a metaphor that made everything just … click. She was the person who told me about the scientific breakthrough of the newfound structure in the body: the interstitium.

While dipping my soggy fries, I was lamenting with Jessica about the lack of language, place and belonging for these people I kept on collecting in my life. They weren’t just independent consultants. I was starting to see this archetype everywhere. I found them trapped working within organizations, not permitted to openly cross pollinate insights from their colleagues to other departments because of org chart hierarchies. They had to do it with soft power and strategic sneaky smarts. I saw them in families - the auntie who knew everyone’s birthday and food allergies, who was the diplomatic glue holding everyone together and getting everyone together. It was the block club captain, self-appointed or otherwise, who was running a mutual aid marketplace making sure everyone’s needs were met. Most of these people happened to be women. None of these people were getting paid for the tremendous value they were generating in the world. Their kind of genius would never win a MacArthur fellowship, as their expertise transcended any one field and was hidden from how we organize our economy, our society. 

Jessica brilliantly said: these people are like this new organ that was just discovered in the human body: the interstitium. They play the role of the connective tissue, and are the secret to how everything works. And they’re basically invisible, despite being ubiquitous. They are … interstitionaries?  

Yes. Fuck. Yes. I remember having to stop myself from following through on a primal, dramatic urge to chuck my cocktail glass on the ground, flip the plate of fries, splattering aioli on the marble floors and yelling triumphantly to the agitated patrons: “Sorry about that, everything just makes perfect sense now!” 

Since that mind-exploding metaphor came into my life, my hands would get sweaty and heart race when talking with other people who exhibited the signs of doing this connective work outside of language. I knew them usually within a minute of meeting them. In asking what they did for work, they were “hard to explain.” Not because of some technical details, but because they didn’t fit into the mental model of what the world has told us we ought to. And whenever I handed them this priceless gift of information about the existence and promise of the interstitium, their reactions varied but were always oversized. Mouths agape, spinning around their office chair, pounding a table, head in their hands. 

The interstitium was the metaphor we all needed.

We did work that was both vital to systems to function and unseen, therefore hard to track, describe and value. Our colleagues and clients couldn’t explain exactly what we do, but know that the organizations and sectors we work with couldn’t function as well without us. 

We didn’t operate as individuals, we were a kind of mycelial network, connecting ideas, information and capital to produce a collective environment conducive to the functioning of the whole.

Funnily enough, it was through mentioning the interstitium on a Zoom call with more people like us, so-called “future architects” that someone messaged me and said: “Hey! I know the guy who helped discover that organ.” I asked for his details. His name was Dr. Neil Theise.