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 ;)

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.

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.”

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.
“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.

Unprecedented concentration of power

We can recognize that over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.”

[…] This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 2019. Wikipedia link. The two passages quoted are from different sections of the book, but their placement together helps with context.

A very small substance

The truth is a very small substance of all information in the world.

First of all, it's costly. If you want want to write a truthful account of anything you need to research, you need to gather evidence, to fact check, to analyze. That's very costly in terms of time and money and effort. Fiction is very cheap. You just write the first things that comes to your mind.

The truth is also often very complicated because reality is complicated, whereas fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be, and people prefer usually simple stories.

And finally the truth can be painful. Whether the truth about us personally — my relationships, what I've done to other people, to myself or entire nations or cultures — whereas fiction, you can you can make it as attractive, as flattering, as you would like it to be.

So in this competition between truth, and fiction, and fantasy, truth is at a huge disadvantage.

If you just flood the world with information most information will not be the truth, and in this ocean of information if you don't give the truth some help, some edge, the truth tends to sink to the bottom, not rise to the top.
Kara Swisher & Yuval Noah Harari on Tech Bros, Witches & the Information Flood. Yuval Noah Harari. October 16, 2024. At 10:58.

The reader must come armed

It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.

A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect.

This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense.

The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because [the reader] comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.
Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Show Business chapter 4, The Typographic Mind, pages 50-51. With apologies to Mr. Postman I've re-ordered and condensed the text (skipping a few paragraphs) for brevity/clarity.
“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.

The moral test of a society

It is time to put a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. […]

Last fall, I gathered with students to talk about mental health and loneliness. As often happens in such gatherings, they raised the issue of social media.

After they talked about what they liked about social media — a way to stay in touch with old friends, find communities of shared interests and express themselves creatively — a young woman named Tina raised her hand. “I just don’t feel good when I use social media,” she said softly, a hint of embarrassment in her voice. One by one, they spoke about their experiences with social media: the endless comparison with other people that shredded their self-esteem, the feeling of being addicted and unable to set limits and the difficulty having real conversations on platforms that too often fostered outrage and bullying. There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it. […]

The moral test of any society is how well it protect its children. Students like Tina and mothers like Lori do not want to be told that change takes time, that the issue is too complicated or that the status quo is too hard to alter.

One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency you don't have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.

Surgeon General: Why I'm Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms, by Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States. New York Times, 17 June 2024

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”.

"Digitality" references for MuseumNext and Computers In Libraries

This week I’ll be speaking at the MuseumNext Green Museums Summit and Computers In Libraries (two separate conferences) about “digitality” and climate action in the cultural sector.

Here’s the gist of it: The climate emergency asks museums, libraries, and other heritage, knowledge, and memory institutions a series of tough questions about their purpose and relevance in society. How big can they work? Who do they involve? Who do they serve?

Compared to the scale and speed of the climate crisis and the mind-blowing scope of what we must accomplish together in the next 10, 20, and 30 years, what can the cultural sector do?

These questions are hard to discuss within the cultural sector. Though the humanistic, prosocial values in the sector are strong the sector’s institutions, in particular, are wary of disruption and have evolved to think in conservative, risk-averse ways. But the climate emergency acts like an X-ray or lie detector on institutional thinking, revealing gaps between values and practice that might go unnoticed when working on smaller concerns.

One of those gaps has to do with digital. Digital is currently a blind spot in our thinking about climate action, and in both of these talks I’ll argue that the museum and library sectors are operating with a confused and outdated concept of digitality that impedes our ability to think clearly about the kinds of impact we are obligated to create. An updated concept of what “digital” means in the 2020s — new tools, new skills (and learning to appreciate neglected old tools and skills) and a new understanding of the digital public sphere are all needed to help us find a new direction and unlock new capabilities within the sector and in the communities we serve.

But (or perhaps, and), going there — having a solid conversation about what digital is and can do requires us to question some tightly held assumptions about trust, disruption, and power.

Below are links to slides, references, and other useful/relevant information cited in the talks.

I’ll post slides transcripts from these talks ASAP.

Resources mentioned in the talks

Updates

General intro stuff from first 10 minutes

European climate and recovery initiatives

The European Commission has put €1.8 trillion on the table for the next 6 years’ work on The New European Bauhaus, pandemic recovery, and European Green Deal.

  • New European Bauhaus
    A new EU initiative launched in 2021 to be the cultural front-end for the European Green Deal. “The New European Bauhaus initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls. Beautiful are the places, practices, and experiences that are: Enriching, inspired by art and culture, responding to needs beyond functionality; Sustainable, in harmony with nature, the environment, and our planet; Inclusive, encouraging a dialogue across cultures, disciplines, genders and ages.”

  • Pandemic recovery
    €807 billion for 7 priority areas, including cohesion, resilience, natural resources/environment.

  • Green Deal
    Targets 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and by 2050: “economic growth decoupled from resource use”, carbon neutral, and “no person and no place left behind”.

Workshop notes (Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe)

Farhad Manjoo: “A bag of mixed emotions”

Why Tech Is Starting to Make Me Uneasy, Farhad Manjoo, 11 October 2017.

“In 2007, when Mr jobs unveiled the iPhone, just about everyone greeted the new device as an unalloyed good. That's no longer true. The state-of-the-art, today, is a bag of mixed emotions. Check might improve everything. And it's probably all so terrible in ways we're only starting to understand.”

Reactions to Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris accord

Pew Research

I cranked through about 10 years of Pew Research Center reports in trying to figure out the evolution of our concept of digitality over the years. The first link, Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center, was particularly useful for gaining some insight into how “experts” conceptualize the role of information technology in society. That being said, I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see so few mentions of the climate emergency in any of these reports. Overall, these Pew reports reminded me of how essential and empowering the Internet is in so many people’s lives.

Here are a handful of the most useful reports. The full list is on this spreadsheet.

“Cataloging projects”

I put this spreadsheet together after reviewing 1000 pages of my own notes on digitality, 30+ reports from the Pew Research Center from the last 10 years, and notes from our November 2021 workshop on cultural-sector climate action.

There are three tabs

  • References lists 323 digital-related sites, apps, technologies, concepts, patterns, phenomena, and attributes that I’ve tagged, subjectively, with some adjectives like prosocial, civic, empowering, and dangerous.

  • Sorted by tag count shows each tag on its own column, and then a list of all the digital-related things that have that tag. You can hover your mouse over each cell to see a note and link (if there is one)

  • Link to sources shows a list of 89 articles, books, and references mentioned on the References tab

The empowering side of digitality

The Dark Side

Disruption Theory

Books, Articles, Videos

A big long list of relevant resources in this spreadsheet here, and a handful of the most relevant below.

Keynote with Meta Knol: The Messy Stuff Wins

How to Create a City of Science, a keynote by Meta Knol & me for the KM World 2021 conference back in November, is about the development of the digital/physical concept for the Leiden 2022 European City of Science initiative, which Meta directs.

Aside from the revelation of her team’s astonishing, 365-days of community-owned and community-led programming, two key moments from Meta’s remarks really stand out for me.

The messy stuff wins

At 18:44, Meta talks about her realization (sparked by some research and thinking I did in response to this tweet) that the messy stuff — content and engagement that is authentic, original, and intuitive — wins out over the steady and predictable “fixed formats” often preferred by traditional organizations.

I didn't expect it to, but it's really true: the messy stuff wins. The most authentic. The most original. The kinds of communications where people would just let go of control and build on trust… To allow spontaneous, original ideas to win from the fixed formats. To make sure that you don’t let the rational get in the way of the intuitive. These are really hard things if you are so much stuck in your pathways. So we had to open up, which also meant that we had to exceed our own expectations for what we wanted to make. And certainly we had to let go of the expectations of others. So: The messy stuff wins. Let go of control.

Let go of the frameworks you learned in school

The other moment that sticks out for me comes at 21:10 where Meta talks about abandoning the traditional frameworks of target groups and “pre-fixed media strategies.”

I said to my team, let’s abandon the whole set of criteria of thinking about target groups and pre-fixed media strategies: What we will do is we will focus on specific interests of people. If you are interested in the stars or astronomy I don’t care if you are a 10-year old girl or a Nobel prize winner. Or if we do an activity on kidneys, and your brother has a kidney disease, then I'm sure you will be interested – and you will be no matter where you were born, in which area, what your income is, what level your education is. So that’s the interesting part, if you really focus on these topics that people are interested in intrinsically then you can just let go of all the frameworks that you learned in school about target groups.

The Leiden 2022 European City of Science formally opens in a public webcast at 2pm CET Saturday.