Contradictory, confusing, inaccurate

“The destructive power of the press becomes even more marked when spread with new technologies. In the 1850s, the telegraph confronted Americans with a steady stream of virtually instant information: contradictory, confusing, overlapping and inaccurate, it scrambled and intensified the political climate. Today, social media is doing the same. At its heart, democracy is a continuing conversation between politicians and the public; it should come as no surprise that dramatic changes in the modes of conversation cause dramatic changes in democracies themselves.”
The Violence at the Heart of Our Politics, by Joanne B. Freeman. New York Times, September 7, 2018. Ms. Freeman is a historian who studies American political violence.
“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”
Author Joyce Carol on Elon Musk. Post on X, 8 November 2025.
“Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.”
From Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Toy Industry by David Robertson and Bill Breen (2013), a work of business journalism detailing the near collapse and eventual renewal of the LEGO group. Brick by Brick is cited as being one of the best case studies about a large corporation ‘listening to its customers’ and returning to its core purpose and values to find the path forward after suffering self-inficted wounds. The full quote/context is: “Today, LEGO regularly engages children in the process of character development, storytelling, and providing feedback on new playset ideas. ‘LEGO has a great expression for why they listen to kids when developing new toys…Mads Nipper, the former head of marketing and product development, liked to say, ‘Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.’”

Link/reference: Gaps and flaws in the traditional boundaries of our work

This is a good writeup of my ideas about creating new norms of practice in the cultural sector. (…I had kind of forgotten that I had put these ideas together so clearly!)

Gaps and Flaws in the Traditional Boundaries of Our Work, (PDF) summary of my presentation/discussion by Janus Boye.

  • What it means to be a professional in an epoch of accelerating change.

  • The Big Frikin’ Wall that stands between us / our organizations and the work we should be doing in society.

  • The “inner dialogue” we all have with the norms/expectations of our professional disciplines.

  • The “handoff” between different sectors of society.

  • The taboos around activism (“we have been miseducated…”).

Link to U.N. Museum TEDx talk

For the convenience of some new collaborators, I dumped the video and transcript of my 2016 TEDx talk about the Museum for the United Nations onto a convenience page here:

https://usingdata.com/tedx

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the theme of top-down & bottom-up change, cultural institutions as catalysts for the know-how and creativity of others (rather than the instution as an exclusive/proprietary authority), and citizen participation is still relevant (and a largely unfulfilled vision) today.

Near-valueless concepts

“Today's internet for most Americans…is an immeasurably potent vibes machine. One powered by a complex fuel of negative emotions — hatred, rage, hopelessness, nihilism, grievance, cynicism, paranoia, discontent and addiction. It’s a machine more than capable of constructing false realities and corroding our lived experiences. Intent, meaning and sincerity are near-valueless concepts in this realm, while things like knowledge, understanding and good faith — critical elements to any healthy public sphere — have been gradually distorted beyond the point of recognition, or abandoned completely.”
Charlie Kirk’s Killing and Our Poisonous Internet, guest essay by Nathan Taylor Pemberton. (“Mr. Pemberton writes about extremisn and American politics.”) New York Times. 14 September 2025. (Soft paywall.)

An Advanced Civilization

“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future. Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”
A passage from the founding legislation that established the American National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1965. The Trump White House fired most of the NEH's advisory council yesterday, "hoping to place members on the board who alighn more closely with [the President's] vision." (Washington Post.) HT Marsha Semmel, who noted in her LinkedIn post, “What a shame, just as we are commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding legislation for NEA and NEH.”

Not preordained

Cory Doctorow at a podium giving his speech.
Ursula Franklin told us that the outcomes of technology, they're not preordained, they're the result of choices we make about how we will use technology in society.

And I really like this. This is a very science fiction way of thinking about technology. I think the message of good science fiction is that it doesn't matter so much what the gadget does as who it does it for and who it does it to. Those social factors, they're far more important than the specifications of the gadget. It's the difference between a system that warns you when your car is about to drift outta your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted outta your lane so they can add $10 to your insurance bill this month. I's the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you made a typo and a spell checker that runs under the “bossware” that lets your manager know that you're like the third most typo prone employee in your department so that they can cut your bonus. It's the difference between the app that remembers where you parked your car for you and the app that uses the location of your car as a criterion for including you in a, in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone who is in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I think that enshittification is not caused by changes in our technology, but by changes to the policy environment, changes to the rules of the game undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, who face no consequences and no accountability for their role in ushering in this and should have seen that we live in, who venture out into polite society every day without ever once wondering whether someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.
2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture: Cory Doctorow, at 34:34.

Careless People, Facebook and de Tocqueville

To me, it seems like a very American thing. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US in the nineteenth century, he was on a rickety steamboat that hit a sandbar and capsized, and he nearly drowned. Afterward he found the manufacturers and asked them why they didn't make the vessels safer. They explained that technological innovation in America happened so quickly there was no point; by the time they made the necessary changes, the boats would be obsolete anyway. Better just to take a chance on what you have. If some drown, no need to dwell, safe in the knowledge that something better is just around the corner. That cheerful recklessness combined with passivity, that forward motion without introspection, that's what Javi's team has.
From Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook. Page 54. “Javi” is Javier Oliván, who was head of Facebook's “growth team” from 2007 to 2022. He is currently Meta's COO.
“One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, that ‘they would not be able to read the novel on their own.’ And these were English majors.”
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? By Hua Hsu. The New Yorker [soft paywall]. June 30, 2025.

For reference, this is the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Elon stopped believing in Mars

“Peter Thiel says 2024 is the year Elon stopped believing in Mars. Mars was supposed to be a political project. It was building an alternative. And in 2024, Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI, it would follow you to Mars. He says, if I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said if trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country, and then elon said there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go. This is the only place that. Maybe that was when elon decided to pump a quarter of a billion dollars into the trump campaign. I guess it was.”
Futurist and author Amy Webb, This Week In Tech episode 1040, 13 July 2025. [Around 1:12:17] Light editing for clarity.

Only a void

Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, fash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing.

Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can't understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists — who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death, dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of Americas Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inocula-tion. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders - Lincoln, Roosevelt, King-quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

The New Rasputins, Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe, by historian Anne Applebaum. The Atlantic, February 2025.

Connected Audience Conference — slides, references, and notes

Image of program description listing speakers

Thursday I’ll present a talk at Connected Audience 2025: Factors, Challenges and Opportunities of Cultural Participation for Youth sponsored by the IfKT, Institute for Cultural Participation Research (Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung), Berlin.

The session will be moderated by Ryan Auster of the Museum of Science, Boston, with Kaly Halkawt Lundström of Stockholm University and Dimitra Christidou and Sofie Amiri from the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

My contribution will be about why we need to create new kinds of museum institutions — everywhere, urgently, starting yesterday — that support young people as legitimate “doers” and problem-solvers in society, and how we approached developing the voice, know-how, and agency of of our visitors at the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.

I’ll post the full talk (both shortened and full versions) as well as slides, notes, and a transcript below.

Slides and Video

Four thumbnails representing the slides, video, and transcript

References

“The right to the future tense”

This is one of the recurring themes of Shoshana Zuboff’s stunning 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Honestly, Google’s AI did a better job summarizing this concept than any single source I’ve found, including Zuboff’s book iteslf: Shoshana Zuboff defines the "right to the future tense" as the fundamental human ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is the essence of free will, autonomy, and the ability to make meaningful choices about one's life. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism, which involves companies using data to control and predict behavior, encroaches upon this right by limiting individual agency and autonomy. (Google Gemini on May 18, 2025, citing an interview with Zuboff in The Harvard Gazette and a book review on Taylor & Francis Online.)

“Information-deficit model of behavior change.” Wikipedia.

“The knowing-doing gap”

Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell, Founder and CEO of Cultural Inquiry

Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation

On the Opening of the Museum of Solutions (my blog; linkedIn)

Webinar, Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action

via NEMO — the Network of European Museum Organizations, 14 February 2023 (Video, slides and background)

“Do we really need to overthink animated movies of fairy tales?” But then I realized, actually, we do. There are lots of things we overthink in our society. I overthink everything all the time, and most of the things I overthink are not nearly as important as the narratives we tell children.
From Little Mermaid Part 1: The Golden Contract (podcast and transcript), Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of how young people develop their understanding of the moral/legal universe.

Looking in the wrong place

But … by the mid-2000s, there still were no real digital books. The Rocket eBook was too little, too early. Sony launched the eink-based Librie platform in 2004 to little uptake. Interactive CD-ROMs had dropped off the map. We had Wikipedia, blogs, and the internet, but the mythological Future Book—some electric slab that would somehow both be like and not like the quartos of yore—had yet to materialize. Peter Meirs, head of technology at Time, hedged his bets perfectly, proclaiming: “Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!”

And then there was. Several devices, actually. The iPhone launched in June 2007, the Kindle that November. Then, in 2010, the iPad arrived. High-resolution screens were suddenly in everyone’s hands and bags. And for a brief moment during the early 2010s, it seemed like it might finally be here: the glorious Future Book.

Yet here’s the surprise: We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

[…] Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong.

For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year.
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, But It's Not What We Expected, by Craig Mod. Wired, 20 December 2018.
“If a society creates situations where people have to get a loan to buy a burrito, is the problem with the person getting a loan to buy a burrito or the society?”
Patrick Beja, commenting on the societal implications of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) vendor Klarna's deal with food delivery service Door Dash, allowing customers to buy a burrito and pay later in 4 easy installments. Via This Week in Tech #1024, Mar 24, 2025 [2:34:00]