The Liverpool Thesis: What drives "culture" at a moment of extraordinary Change?

children play in a colorful museum installation. The Liverpool Thesis title and author Michael Peter Edson appear overlaid

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This is a fleshed-out version of a set of slides I first started working on for the Hands On! Children in Museums conference in Liverpool, England in November, 2025.

At the time I really struggled to explain, in fewer than 200 slides, how and why the world is changing and what difference that should make to the people who take responsibility for culture and cultural heritage (museums, libraries, knowledge and memory institutions & etc) and those who think about and work towards improving young people’s futures.

In standard museum practice, and particularly in children’s museums, I think there’s often a mindset that young people are small, proto-adults, ready to receive our guidance and wisdom, who need protection from the adult world while they develop. And while this is true to some degree (and depending on the age and developmental level of the child), despite our inclination to protect them the decisions of adults have foreclosed on young people’s futures in unprecedented ways.

Young people are no longer afforded a long, blissful childhood free of concern about the climate emergency, loss of biodiversity, biotech, AI, the poisoning of the public sphere, and the diminishment of truth, reason, and human rights. And these have dimmed the future not just for children but for all of us.

My approach here is to take this set of slides to weave together a coherent story about the world we actually live in and what that implies for the role and purpose of cultural institutions and cultural practice.

Then, in a longer set of reference slides, provide more depth, references, examples, and practical tools and frameworks that practitioners can use to investigate these assertions on their own and perhaps initiate change in their own work and institutions.

Basically, I am asserting that thinking about the world now from the perspective of young people gives us clearer insight into the revolution, disruption, and “derangement” (our inability to grasp the scale of the climate crisis through our current cultural forms; a term from Amitav Ghosh) we now face together.

…And as a result, institutions (such as “culture”, knowledge, memory…) must now be “places of appearance” — a term from Hannah Arendt —where people constitute their agency to build a better world.

Here’s the thesis, in a nutshell:

  1. Cultural Revolution — We are living in the middle of a cultural revolution, not yet usefully described in the public sphere, that is driving a wedge between citizens (adults), young people, and a future that is joyous, sustainable and just. 

  2. Ruptures – The cultural revolution consists of ruptures in values, knowing, and power. This creates a derangement that we feel in civics, democracy, and everyday life.

  3. Drivers — These ruptures are more than mere politics and norms: they arise from a violent confluence: a “phase change” in our relationship to the biosphere, the social sphere, and technology. This creates an “age of consequences” in which the presumption of a stable, predictable world is gone.

  4. Institutions — In this deranged moment, institutions — our intermediaries of culture and power (such as the “cultural sector”, broadly defined) — must be our allies in natality, building our capacity to create new worlds through actions and speech. Without this we are stranded between the world that has passed and the one that will, by necessity, be born.

  5. The Global Street — This drama of revolution, rupture, derangement, and rebirth is now playing out on the global street of global cities. The future will be won or lost here, where “culture” helps to constitute, or fails to constitute, our right to stand together as authors of a better world.

These points build on the work of Ghosh, Saskia Sassen (the global city, global street), Hannah Arendt (natality and places of appearance), and Donella Meadows (systems change), among others.

Finally, a note about “children’s museums.”

I don’t think the museum, library, and cultural sector takes museums for children and youth seriously enough, to their own and our collective detriment.

Every discipline teaches us a new way to see the world. And thought I have worked for many years on using cultural infrastructure to spark and sustain global civic engagement I had never immersed myself in the beautiful complexities of children’s museums and children’s futures until I started working on MuSo, the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.

Seeing the world — this world, now — through the eyes of young people has been extraordinarily clarifying; and the discipline of children’s museum practice, in which I am still a rank beginner, has drawn me into the most beautiful and consequential ideas I’ve ever encountered. The world of adults is plainly out of sync with reality and constituting the rights, moral standing, and capabilities of young people may lead us to constituting them for the rest of us, the planet, and all living things.

I invite you to flip through these—not as a finished product, but as a provocation on what this moment mean and what our institutions must become.

Phone-free childhood

children walking down a shopping street
In 2023, the Irish seaside town just south of Dublin [Greystone] launched a grass-roots initiative led by local parents, school principals and community members to loosen the grip of technology on their younger kids by adopting a voluntary “no smart devices” code and supporting it with workshops and social events...
“It was one of the first places that took collective action,” said Daisy Greenwell, who co-founded Britain’s Smartphone Free Childhood movement later the same year — inspired, in part, by Greystones. “It made me think that we could shift the culture here, too.”
A Phone-Free Childhood? One Irish Village Is Making It Happen. By Sally McGranePhotographs by Therese Aherne, New York Times, March 25, 2026.

Children and Young People's Assembly On Biodiversity Loss

Some members of the 2022 Assembly. Photo: https://cyp-biodiversity.ie/resources/

In October 2022, Ireland held its first Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss. Over two weekends, the Assembly brought together 35 randomly selected members aged 7–17 from across Ireland to explore, discuss and create calls to action on how to protect and restore biodiversity in Ireland.

To make sure the Children and Young People’s Assembly was designed in a way that worked for children and young people, the project was created and facilitated by an intergenerational team consisting of a Young Advisory Team and an independent research consortium.

The Young Advisory Team comprised nine children and young people from across Ireland, aged 8-16. The research consortium included experts in children’s participation, deliberative democracy, and biodiversity from Dublin City University, University College Cork, and terre des hommes, an international organisation with a focus on children’s environmental rights.

The Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss was commissioned by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.
Children and Young People's Assembly on Biodiversity Loss - About. This blog post from DemocracyNext (March 2026) features background and interviews with some of the organizers and participants (Ireland, and related initiatives in Switzerland)

Virtue

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
Adam Serwer's dispatch from Minnesota (The Atlantic, 26 January 2026) as referenced by Ezra Klein, Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself, NY Times, 1 February 2026.

If you're serious about making history

I want to invoke the deathless quote given to [journalist Ron] Suskend in 2004 in which the logic the history-making, the logic of this project of power was laid out:

The aide [to President George W. Bush] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

There's a liberal knee-jerk in us which is just repelled by this language, by this refusal of the fact-based reality. But if you're serious about making history this is exactly how you act. This is exactly how you act. This is the template of how you would understand the process of making change. Of course, it ends in disaster…
Adam Tooze, in his 2026 lecture Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War, citing Ron Suskind's 2004 story in the New York Times' magazine, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Reference slides for Hands On! conference talk: Youth, Megacities, and the New Museums of the Future

A long, excruciatingly comprehensive set of “reference slides” (and work in progress) from my short, November 2025 talk at the Hands On! Conference at the Eureka! National Children’s Museum conference Liverpool.

At some point I’ll boil this down into a shorter, 20-30 slide summary but for now I wanted to try to lay out the whole case in all its glory, warts and all.

Download/view

PDF
Slides (via Google Slides)

Contents

  1. Intro/overview: Why build a children’s museum (or any kind of museum) now?

  2. Interlude — 3 stories

  3. The world we live in — cultural revolution and axiological rifts

  4. What does this mean for young people?

  5. What does this mean for our institutions and practice?

  6. Change is possible

  7. Questions I often get at this point

  8. Helpful frameworks (tools for thinking and working together)

    The Big Frikin’ Wall; Zuckerman Quadrant; Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast, Activism, & etc

    The emergence of children’s rights and the rights of future generations

    Leverage Points in a System (Donella Meadows)

  9. Examples - real-world inspiration (~60 projects)

  10. Current work – bringing the vision to scale

  11. Conclusion

More context (cross post from LinkedIn)

Reference slides for "Youth, Megacities, and the New Museums of Tomorrow" — a short talk I gave at the Hands On! - International Association of Children in Museums conference in Liverpool in November.

I'm arguing here...laying out the evidence and rationale...that we are in the midst of a cultural revolution — a "phase change" in the functioning of the world — that is driving a wedge between young people and their human right to shape and enjoy a common future.

These changes affect all of us profoundly, and in response, I think that children's museums — all knowledge, memory, and "cultural" institutions, really — need to dramatically reconsider their purpose, scope and methods.
We need to up our game, and fast.

As Greta Thunberg told the European Parliament in 2019, seemingly a thousand years ago, "Everyone and everything has to change. But the bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty."

C02 is a big driver of the cultural revolution(s) and "rift" but as I see it, the main challenge lies in the combinatory effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, digital (Big Tech) and biotech, concentrations of wealth and power, and the advent of a new kind of change (accelerating, tipping points, delays between cause and effect) that exceeds our human capacity to think, learn, and make wise decisions in an era that needs, as Zeynep Tufekci says, "all the sociological imagination we can get."

That's *a lot* to take in. It's a big problem space and a big "ask" to figure out a new way to work and act in such an uncertain time. But the great systems thinker Donella Meadows observed that paradigms in transition are actually easier to change.

And the good news is that there are loads of inspiring, practical examples to draw from for those who have the curiosity and imagination to think about our institutions and practice in new way. I've included over 60 examples of projects, exhibits, and strategies in these reference slides as well as a dozen or so frameworks and "thinking tools" that I've found particularly useful over the years.

What is the road ahead? I think it's to move beyond the idea that young people are small "future adults" to be educated and toward the idea that young people are legitimate and forceful civic actors with the rights, capabilities, and moral standing to shape the world on their own terms.

But to achieve this paradigm change, young people everywhere need dramatically better allies and institutions from the world of adults, and there are lessons here for all of museum and cultural practice.

"I came away both slightly terrified about the world young people are growing up in and inspired to do something about it" is how session chair Nick Woodrow, a Board member at Eureka! described my talk, and terrified and inspired is how I feel too ;)

Now is the time of monsters

“There’s this quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci that has been making the rounds a lot over the past few years. It goes, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’

There’s also a looser translation of that last line that you hear sometimes: ‘Now is the time of monsters.’”
Ezra Klein, from How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze. New York Times, January 30, 2026. The quote is from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, over 3,000 pages in 30+ notebooks written between 1926-1937 while he was imprisonied by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime.

No room for youth

“The empire [of artificial intelligence] is being built by people who treat the world as a spreadsheet, where the ‘human condition’ is reduced to a set of computable variables. In the rooms where the most foundational decisions about our future are made, the child is not present. The needs of a developing mind, the right to privacy, and the importance of a slow, non-optimized childhood are missing from the code, because the architects are optimized for a world that has no room for the ‘unproductive’ vulnerability of youth.”
Karen Hao, The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI.

All technologies

“[Neil Postman’s] questions can be asked about all technologies and media. What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by them? Do they free us or imprison us? Do they improve or degrade democracy? Do they make our leaders more accountable or less so? Our system more transparent or less so? Do they make us better citizens or better consumers? Are the trade-offs worth it? If they’re not worth it, yet we still can’t stop ourselves from embracing the next new thing because that’s just how we’re wired, then what strategies can we devise to maintain control?”
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985. (via 20th anniversary Edition, published 2005)

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.

Author Joyce Carol on Elon Musk

“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.

“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.”