A lunchpail job

I've learned one thing over these last 9 years — and I was glib at best and probably dismissive at worst about this: The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunchpail f**king job, day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart, and dedicated people bang on closde doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues until they get a positive result.

And even then they have to stay on to make sure that result holds.

So the good news is I'm not saying you don't have to worry about who wins the election. I'm saying you have to worry about every day before it and every day after. Forever.

…Although, I am told that at some point the sun will run out of hydrogen.
Jon Stewart, What Jon learned while he was away, The Daily Show. 15 February, 2024. "9 years ago" refers to 2015, the year Steward left his job as host of The Daily Show.

TIME names MuSo one of the World's 100 Greatest Places for 2024

TIME Magazine has named MuSo, the Museum of Solutions, one of the World's 100 Greatest Places for 2024.

Congratulations to my beloved (brave, visionary, foolhardy, loving, stubborn :) MuSo colleagues — and the kids and community who keep it real there, every day.

MuSo is in good company here. Fifty-one cultural and nature/heritage destinations in 31 countries are named in TIME's list, among them are the Putep ‘t-awt nature trail and whale observatory in Quebec, Canada; the Ivomo Tea Cooperative in Gisakura, Rwanda; and the Bab Al Salam Mosque in Muscat, Oman.

These are marvelous destinations indeed! But for my own part, as I've said before, I'm a little uncomfortable with these kinds of honors. They can feel arbitrary and superficial, and there are always hundreds of other extraordinary places, projects, and communities, all over the world, that will never get the recognition and support they deserve.

Also, as part of MuSo's founding team, I know our blind spots and skeletons-in-the-closet all too well: If only the reviewers knew too…LOL! My lips are sealed!

That being said, little winks of recognition like TIME's Greatest Places list provide a kind of validation that is incredibly useful to the teams and founders/funders who leap into the void, almost literally*, to start and sustain risky projects like MuSo.

It's scary — a vulnerable feeling — to create a startup venture of any kind, let alone one that seeks to reach so deeply, and so publicly, into the "now" and futures of young people. A billion decisions must be made, often quickly and in a vacuum of expertise and evidence, and it can be hard to tell which decisions are consequential or costly, right or wrong, until long after the moment has passed. Successes often feel quiet and fleeting, while mistakes can be public and harsh.

And a new concept like MuSo is an uncertain proposition for visitors and community too: What is this strange, new place? What will be expected of me? What will I do there? How will it make me feel?

So the editorial imprimatur of TIME — really every sliver of evidence that something new is heading in a good direction — really does help to give founders, funders, teams and communities some confidence that the bold new thing they're creating together makes sense at some level.

That's half the battle, as far as I'm concerned: to gain the confidence and resilience to keep working on hard things together ("Work that matters", as Tim O'Reilly once said), whether in the schoolyard, at the family dinner table, or on a global scale.

In a way, there's some symmetry in this equation. Some poetry too. Finding confidence and resilience is in the meta-purpose of MuSo: to help everyone keep working together — joyfully, purposefully, and playfully — until we get the good stuff right.

//

This post on LinkedIn (link)
TIME's 100 Greatest Places, 2024, MuSo: https://time.com/6992399/museum-of-solutions/
The whole list: https://time.com/collection/worlds-greatest-places-2024/

* During MuSo’s construction I almost stepped off a scaffolding into an open 9-story stairwell.

“Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. When I looked at these images, something broke. Some limit had been reached.”
Susan Sontag, on her reaction to seeing images from the Nazi atrocities in Europe, from her seminal 1977 book On Photography. Via Diverting Focus: Trump is already numbing us to the horrific images his plans would create, by Philip Kennicott. Washington Post, July 4, 2024. (Diverting Focus is the headline in the print edition.)
Kennicott reflects on the power of documentary photography to act as a kind of “photographic concience” in society and Trump's efforts to desensitize us to its effects.

Incremental

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.
Steve Jobs, via Steve Jobs in 1994: The Rolling Stone Interview by Jeff Goodell, June, 1994

Announced today: Director of the Museum of Solutions, Mumbai (MuSo)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Museum of Solutions, Mumbai
May 10, 2023

Today we are proud to announce the appointment of Michael Peter Edson as the Chief Museum Officer (museum director) of the Museum of Solutions. Edson, an internationally renowned museum professional, will be responsible for leading the museum’s mission to inspire and empower young people to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

“Mike has been a long-time friend and supporter of MuSo,” said Tanvi Jindal the museum’s Founder. “He is a visionary and empathetic leader with a passion for the social impact of museums. Mike’s creative drive and his deep commitment to the rights and capabilities of young people make him an ideal leader for our organization.”

With over 30 years of experience in museums, Edson has long been at the forefront of transformational change in the cultural sector. Edson was formerly the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex in Washington, D.C., and he was the co-founder of the Museum for the United Nations - UN Live, where he forged a new vision to catalyze global effort towards the sustainable development goals of the U.N.. Edson is a frequent speaker on the topic of technology, culture, and social change, and he has been active as a consultant and collaborator in over 20 countries.

“MuSo is a groundbreaking initiative: full of global significance, but founded on a true love for the people and future of Mumbai,” said Edson. “The world is changing quickly and museums are changing too. Traditionally, museums have looked backward at the past through the eyes of a few experts — today, museums are looking toward the future, inspired to make a better world with and for the communities they serve. I am honored to be joining the Museum of Solutions at this important time.”

Mike will join the team full-time in August.

About MuSo

The Museum of Solutions (MuSo) is a new, state-of-the-art museum in Mumbai, India, dedicated to inspiring and empowering people to solve the world’s most pressing problems. MuSo’s exhibits and programs will explore a variety of topics, including climate change, poverty, and inequality through hands-on exploration and playful learning. The museum will open its new, purpose-built 100,000 square foot facility in the heart of Mumbai's Upper Parel district in 2023.
Press release, Museum of Solutions, May 10, 2023 (via LinkedIn)
A small picture gallery about the museum is here (my photos).

MuseumNext Interview: Culture, activism, and the big Frikin' Wall

Jim Richardson and Tim Deakin published a long interview with me on the MuseumNext website in advance of the Green Museum Summit.

As a former Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution and co-founder of the Museum of the United Nations – UN Live, Michael Peter Edson’s career has often been intertwined with the big issues over the last 30 years.

He explains to MuseumNext why the landscape has changed for museums and how passivity is no longer an option in the face of urgent issues like climate change. Instead, he advocates for new and dynamic forms of activism in order to have a “consequential impact on the course of the Anthropocene”.

Video and slides/links for NEMO webinar, Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action

A quick post here with some links I’ll mention in tomorrow’s Feb. 14 Webinar for NEMO – the Network of European Museum Organizations: Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action.

Video of the talk and Q&A

Slides: Google Slides / slides in a static PDF format

Recommended books/articles

Below are some of the books/articles I recommend towards the end of the talk, more-or-less in order of appearance.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions!

On the edge of collapse

The Rite of Spring was a revolutionary work for a revolutionary time. Its first performance in Paris [in 1813] was a key moment in cultural history – a tumultuous scandal.

Written on the eve of the first world war and the Russian revolution, the piece is the emblem of an era of great scientific, artistic and intellectual ferment. No composer since can avoid the shadow of this great icon of the 20th century, and score after score by modern masters would be unthinkable without its model.

The Rite of Spring has survived many trials in its first 100 years, not excluding the notorious premiere, during which Nijinsky's provocative choreography elicited such a volume of abuse that the music itself was frequently inaudible. Initial performances – even Stravinsky's own – of this immensely complex score were often on the edge of collapse, but the piece is now part of the international orchestral repertoire and the greatest risk it faces today, paradoxically, is routine renditions which make a work which should shock seem safe and easy.

George Benjamin, How Stravinsky's Rite of Spring has shaped 100 years of music, The Guardian, 29 May 2013

Set for chaos

Wapo 1 and 2_1500w.JPG
“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence nave been delusional. …

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory with whatever means necessary. …

The stage is thus being set for chaos.
The Opinions Essay / Opinion: Our constitutional crisis is already here, by contributing columnist Robert Kagan. Washington Post, September 26, 2021.

From a 6,000 word piece in Sunday’s Washington Post. I was glad to see this published — a very unusual (the Post’s editors seemed to barely knew where to put it), comprehensive, and forceful “long read” that attempts to make sense of this dangerous moment in America. The sense of doom, of the walls closing in on us from every direction (political, cultural, educational, economic) feels very true to me.

A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it. We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. …

Today’s arguments…will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy. Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it.

A sting in the tail

This failure [to develop a global vaccination program] is all the more glaring for another lesson that the pandemic revealed: Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.

The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that “anything we can actually do, we can afford.” The sheer scale of the action was intoxicating. … If money was a mere technicality, what else could be done? Action on social justice, climate change, the Green New Deal, all seemed within reach.

[But] Keynes’s bon mot has a sting in its tail: We can afford anything we can actually do. The problem is agreeing on what to do and how to do it.”

What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?, by economic historian Adam Tooze. New York Times, September 1, 2021

Actionable solutions

Bruce Springsteen, talking with President Barack Obama.

Then came the country music in my late 20s and 30s. Looking for other solutions than Rock music provided. Rock music was a great music and there was some class anger in it and that agreed with me. Ah, then there was a beautiful romanticism and melodies, a lot of energy. But as you were getting older, it didn't address your adult problems.

So I went to Country music. Country music was great, incredible singing and playing, but it was rather fatalistic. You know?

So, I said well, “Who's trying to play…Where is a music of hope?” And when you went to Woody Guthrie and Bob [Dylan], you know... They were spelling out the hard world that you lived in, but they were also providing you, somehow, with some transcendence and some actionable solution to societal, and your own, personal problems. You could be active.

That drew my attention because I was now a relatively big rock star. I was interested in maintaining ties to my community. I was interested in giving voice to both myself and folks in my community. I was also interested in being active to a certain degree, taking some of what I was earning, putting it back into the community […] And that was where I found my full satisfaction and that's how I put all the pieces together.

Bruce Springsteen, talking with President Barack Obama in the American Music episode of their podcast series Renegades, via @kattvantar.

Some reading on "change"

A few weeks ago a friend asked me for reading recommendations on the subject of “change” — by which she meant how the world is changing, how society is changing, and how change happens within organizations and groups.

We throw around the word change a lot but what does it really mean to people? How do we make change happen? We don’t discuss this very often, and the question of why that is came up at a recent talk I gave for the German Federal Cultural Foundation's Digital Fund.

I recommended, to my friend, the following books and articles as a starting point. These resources, among many more, have helped me get a feel for what change is and how people think about it from a variety of perspectives.

For my own work I’m focusing in on the idea that change itself is changing — and my work for the Smithsonian, the United Nations, the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, and others has been about re-shaping institutions (or creating new ones) to deal with the fact that change is now faster, more disruptive, more surprising, and more complex than it has ever been before. This new kind of change poses enormous risks for society if we can’t increase the speed and clarity with which we deal with the world around us. (Take our sclerotic response to the climate emergency, for example.)

Indeed, we may soon look back on 2020 and say, “Wow, I wish things were as calm and mellow as they were back then.”

Change and Human Factors

Surgical Checklists Save Lives — but Once in a While, They Don’t. Why?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/magazine/surgical-checklists-save-lives-but-once-in-a-while-they-dont-why.html
By Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times, 9 May 2018

”What happened? How could an idea that worked so effectively in so many situations fail to work in this one? The most likely answer is the simplest: Human behavior changed, but it didn’t change enough.”

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds: New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, February 27, 2017 issue

This article covers the hypothesis that what we think of as human intelligence arose not to enable us to solve complex, scientific and logical problems but to give us the wits necessary to avoid getting screwed (killed, ostracized, marginalized) by our social group. This idea explained a lot about the phenomena of fake news, conspiracy theories, and Trumpism for me.

“Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments. Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, ‘This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.’”

Change, Networks & Communities

Twitter and Tear Gas: The power and fragility of networked protest
https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
By Zeynep Tufekci, 2017

Do yourself a favor and read everything by Zenyep. Here is her work in The Atlantic, and here’s a nice profile of her in the New York Times.

“…The ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacity among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation. The expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts many participants and thrives both online and offline, but movements falter in the long term unless they create the capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.”


Emergent Strategy
(via Google books, with links to local libraries and booksellers)
By Adrienne Maree Brown, 2017

“We learned that every member of the community holds pieces of the solution, even if we are all engaged in different layers of the work. We learned to look for telltale signs that actions were community based. One indicator that things are off is when impacted communities and people of color get involved and they are put in the role of “performing the action,” for example, having their photos taken, being spokespeople, or being asked to endorse or represent work they don’t get to lead, etc., while most of the background organizing is still dominated by the folks who aren’t impacted and won't be around long term to sustain the campaign or to be held accountable. At its worst, this approach builds up hope and encourages local communities to take risks, and then abandons them with the results.”

Bunch of Amateurs: A search for the American character
(via Google books, with links to local libraries and booksellers)
Jack Hitt, 2012

“Innovation is supposed to happen one of two ways. There is the Great Galilean Aha!—the Instantaneous, practically divine revelation—and the Edisonian Grind, the slow-motion epiphany involving the unending effort for the inventor who lives in the lab struggling through trial and error until he arrives at the answer. […] But amateurs show that there is another path to innovation that doesn’t yet have a movie shorthand—the collaborative, marginal effort that culminates in a Great New Thing.”

A Sense of Urgency
https://www.kotterinc.com/book/a-sense-of-urgency/
By John Kotter, 2008

Kotter’s research indicates that 70% of change initiatives fail, and the thing that unifies the best and most successful initiatives is “a sense of urgency.” This book is worth its weight in gold just for its description of the “false urgency” that is seen inside many organizations, and the concrete, tactical descriptions of what actual urgency is and how to develop it.

My favorite story from the book is about Caroline Ortega, a 27-year-old mid-level employee in a data management firm, and her experience raising urgency within her organization.

This short podcast from Harvard Business Review gives a pretty good summary.

Kotter’s other books, including Leading Change and The Heart of Change: real-life stories of how people change their organizations, are also excellent — good places to start if you’re interested in organizational change.

25 years of Wired predictions: Why the future never arrives
https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/
By DAVID KARPF, 18 September 2018

David Karpf read every issue of Wired magazine from cover-to-cover to see what he could learn about how the Wired community views the world.

“WILLIAM GIBSON IS said to have remarked that ‘the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’ Paging through the first 25 years of WIRED, what’s most striking is that the future never becomes evenly distributed. Sure, everyone gets on Facebook and uses Google, but the dinosaurs never die outright, and the new age of abundance never quite gains its inviolable foothold. The future just keeps arriving, mutating, bowing to the fickle pressures of advertising markets and quarterly earnings reports.”

“Wired’s early visions of the digital future, the mistake that seems most glaring is the magazine’s confidence that technology and the economics of abundance would erase social and economic inequality. The digital revolution’s track record suggests that its arc doesn’t always bend toward abundance—or in a straight line at all. It flits about, responding to the gravitational forces of hype bubbles and monopoly power, warped by the resilience of old institutions and the fragility of new ones.”

Tactical Urbanism: Short-term action for long-term gain
Volume 1: free pdf / Commercial press version via Google Books, with links to local libraries & book sellers)
By Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, 2015

“It’s easier for any of us to envision what the future can be if you can see it, touch it and taste it as well. Instead of looking at a piece of paper, we want people to experience it.” (Quoting Pat Brown, instigator of a local project in Memphis, Tennessee.)

“Too often, cities only look to big-budget projects to revitalize a neighborhood. There are simply not enough of those projects to go around. We want to encourage small, low-risk, community-driven improvements all across our city that can add up to larger, long-term change.” (Quoting Memphis mayor A. C. Wharton.)
 

Environmental change

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html  
By Nathaniel Rich, New York Times, 1 August 2018

A harrowing, beautifully written story about the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989 — “the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.”

“We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. ‘People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,’ he said. ‘And then: Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ — My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? […]

”Few of these policy geniuses were showing much sense. They understood what was at stake, but they hadn’t taken it to heart. They remained cool, detached — pragmatists overmatched by a problem that had no pragmatic resolution.”
(The scene described was at the so-called Pink Palace conference, a gathering of climate scientists and policy experts, in 1980.)

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
By Brooke Jarvis, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 27, 2018

Another harrowing story about the collapse of ecosystems, revealing the degree to which we humans struggle to comprehend incremental, planetary-scale change.

“Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. […] Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: “Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change.”

Winning Slowly is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/
By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017

Economist and environmentalist Bill McKibben has been writing powerfully about the climate emergency for over 20 years. His books Eaarth (two “a’s”, because, as he argues, our current Earth is much different than the old one) and Deep Economy helped me form my first ideas about the urgent need for climate action. Here are McKibben’s 17 articles for Rolling Stone — pick one at random and start reading.

“If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced.”

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
By Tim Urban, January 22, 2015

This 2-part post on Wait, But Why is a good, accessible primer on Artificial Intelligence and it gives a glimpse of what the runaway acceleration of technological change could yield.

“When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. [But] in order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now. […] And if you spend some time reading about what’s going on today in science and technology, you start to see a lot of signs quietly hinting that life as we currently know it cannot withstand the leap that’s coming next.”

Change and the future

William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias
https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apocalypses-dystopias.html
By Abraham Riesman, Vulture, 1 August 2019

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real
By Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, December 16, 2019 issue

A couple of stunning, difficult, quirky profiles of novelist William Gibson.

“Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. ‘The future is already here,’ he has said. ‘It’s just not very evenly distributed.’

Q: How do you account for the recent surge in popular fiction about the collapse of civilization into dystopia or Armageddon?}

Gibson: This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.”

What perpetual war looks like in America
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-perpetual-war-looks-like-in-america/2019/08/04/8f89c95a-b6da-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html
By Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post, August 4, 2019

The idea, from the Washington Post’s cultural critic, that America’s civil war is already here — it just doesn’t look like we had imagined it.

From a scene outside a Hooter’s restaurant in El Paso, Texas, after a mass shooting in August, 2019.
“The eyes of the Hooters [restaurant] owl stare at us, as if through large goggles, wide open with shock and horror. In front of the restaurant, men and women in military fatigues, some with helmets, others dressed more provisionally, hurry past, bearing a formidable arsenal of weapons and communications gear. This is what war looks in America, a surreal juxtaposition of familiar logos and brand names and a now all-too-familiar display of police response.”

Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow
By Yuval Noah Harari, 2017

I saw Yuval Harari give a short, impassioned talk about the dangers of AI to a group of elderly philanthropists at a birthday party in Israel a few years ago. There must have been 1,000 people there and one-by-one you could see the comprehension, and then the shock and fear, wash across their faces: How can this be?

“In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don't understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic polities is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future… Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don't understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone…The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone.”

The pandemic is a portal
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
By Arundhati Roy, Financial Times, April 3, 2020

The novelist Arundhati Roy on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next. 

“The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. […] Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km away].

‘Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us’, he said. 

‘Us’ means approximately 460 million people.

[…]

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

* * *

Excerpts from these and other books/articles are posted to this blog, tagged #change. 

…Also this slide deck/talk of mine, How Change Happens, might be useful for people thinking about creating institutional or sector-wide change.

…And while I'm at it, a draft foreword of my book, The Age of Scale, is about the topic of accelerating change: 

German Federal Cultural Foundation Digital Fund

german cultural foundation.png

Last week I gave a keynote for a convening of new grantees from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes / German Federal Cultural Foundation's Digital Fund, which just made an impressive award of €13.2m in grants to 15 projects by 32 organizations.

The talk addressed 3 main questions identified by the Digital Fund's director, Julia Mai.

  1. What does digital society look like in the future?

  2. What role should cultural institutions play in the future?

  3. How can cultural institutions shape & respond to digital change?

Here are the slides, with annotations, references, and links: Digital Culture and the Shaking Hand of Change

Such was their belief

DURING SUBSEQUENT VISITS TO NEPAL, I WOULD CONTINUE TO HEAR stories about the power of these challenge grants. One of our projects, Himalaya Primary School, was located on the outskirts of Kathmandu, in a poor community whose economy depended on the local brick factories. The local soil was conducive to brickmaking, and six soot-belching factories surrounded the village. On a site visit to check on progress, I met the headmaster. He proudly recounted how he'd visited each factory to ask for support in building a new school. He reminded each factory owner that the workers’ ‘wages were so low that parents could not afford to contribute to the challenge grant. But Room to Read required each community to coinvest, so he proposed an innovative solution: each factory owner would donate 10,000 bricks, and Room to Read’s money would be used to buy cement, window frames, desks, and to pay for skilled labor to erect the walls. His sales strategy succeeded, and once again I was blown away by the ingenuity of the communities with which we partnered.

Two days after my visit to Himalaya Primary School, Dinesh took me into the foothills of the mountains west of Kathmandu. Our destination was the village of Katrak, which perched on a hillside overlooking verdant rice fields. Dinesh parked our rented truck along the side of the road, and with a head nod and a shout of “Jhane ho. Orolo” (Let’s go! Uphill), he announced to me that we had a steep hike in front of us.

At 8 a.m. the sun was already burning down on us, and my pace slowed as I stopped for applications of sun cream and gulps from my water bottle. On frequent occasions women with large bags hoisted onto their backs rushed past me, heading up the trail. I could not hope to match their pace, even though I was carrying only my water bottle and a Nikon. I asked Dinesh if they were returning from the market. He laughed and asked whether I realized that these women were carrying cement. I must have looked perplexed, so he explained.

When the local government of the village of Katrak requested Room to Read’s help, Dinesh and Yadav (our civil engineer in charge of the School Room program) said that they would provide half the resources if the village could come up with the other half. The head of the village development committee told our team that the village was poor, with more than 95 percent of parents living on subsistence farming. What little economy the village had was simple barter, and as a result few parents could afford to put money into the project.

Yadav explained that contributions other than cash would count toward the challenge grant. As an example, parents could

prove their commitment to education and the new school by donating labor. The women we saw this morning had responded to the call. Each morning, a group of them would wake up before sunrise, walk an hour downhill to the roadside where the cement bags were being stored, and then walk 90 minutes back up to the village. The bags weighed 50 kilos—110 pounds—and some mothers were making the trip twice in one day. Dinesh reminded me that this was a farming village, and that the women would still have to spend their day in the fields.

We crested the hill and on the building site saw 20 men, presumably the fathers, digging the foundation and beginning to put up the walls. I asked one of the mothers if I could try picking up her bag of cement. I nearly threw my back out as I struggled to get the bag above my waist. The mothers were greatly entertained, and the group around me grew larger as I failed to impress them as Hercules.

I outweighed these women by at least 50 pounds. Most of them probably survived on two bowls of rice and lentils per day. Such was their belief in the power of education to provide their children with a brighter future that they were willing to make any sacrifice. I felt inspired and vowed to work even harder to find the funding to enable more of these challenge grants. I also vowed that I'd get to the gym to lift weights a bit more often.

From Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John Wood's inspiring book about founding Room To Read.
“There are incremental advances that happen in all kinds of things. Every once in a while there’s just this iconic leap. Soloing El Cap is just this quantum leap. ”
— Peter Croft, a professional rock climber, on Alex Honnold’s free solo climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan in June 2017. From Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo.