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.

I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?)

I just posted a new essay, I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers, subtitled “Can museums save the world'?

It’s an un-edited, pre-publication draft of a piece for for Seize the Moment: Rethinking the Museum (Marsha Semmel, Ken Yellis, Avi Decter, ed.) to be published in early 2022 by Rowman and Littlefield. It is also an expansion of a short piece I wrote with the same title for Ten Perspectives on the Future of Digital Culture, a 2018 publication commemorating the 10th anniversary of Europeana.

The basic idea of the essay is to use a very modest, first-person time-travel narrative as a way to speak bluntly about what I see as the cultural sector’s reticence to get much involved in climate action and social justice.

In one passage I find myself standing at my office window looking out at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution in the days, months, and years following 9-11 (a very real memory for me and one that has shaped much of my work over the last 20 years).

How would these three, august institutions help us understand what had happened to us as a nation? What would they do to help us chart our way forward in this complex and dangerous world?

As I stared into my beer, I couldn’t think of a single thing that any of these institutions, or even museums in general, had done to help Americans think clearer thoughts or make better decisions after 9/11. It wasn’t a museum’s job, or so we thought. Just hunker down, entertain the guests, conserve the collections and don’t rock the boat. So we lost our minds and went to war for 20 years without even an exhibition catalog as a souvenir.

More at I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?).

* * * On a related note, in November, 2021 I’m organizing a workshop and strategy charrette to try and do something to jumpstart real action from the cultural sector. We need help funding travel for participants. Please give us a hand!

GoFundMe: Help Send Climate Activists To The Hague
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-send-climate-activists-to-the-hague

Image credits: Remix of ‘The Boyfriend’ by Alžbeta Halušková. CC BY-SA. Source material: Za frajerom | Hanula, Jozef. Slovak National Gallery. Public domain. Creator: Alžbeta Halušková. Date: 2018. Country: Slovakia. CC BY-SA

It's on us

Robert Kagan’s gut-wrenching essay in the Washington Post on Sunday about the crisis in American democracy (see below) reminded me of this 2018 piece by Zeynep Tufekci in the MIT Technology Review, How social media Took us from Tahir Square to Donald Trump.

At the end, Tufekci argues that while corporate social media and Russian election interference were a horrible influence on democratic processes, Russian trolls didn’t get us to where we are by themselves.

But we didn’t get where we are simply because of digital technologies. The Russian government may have used online platforms to remotely meddle in US elections, but Russia did not create the conditions of social distrust, weak institutions, and detached elites that made the US vulnerable to that kind of meddling.

Russia did not make the US (and its allies) initiate and then terribly mishandle a major war in the Middle East, the after-effects of which—among them the current refugee crisis—are still wreaking havoc, and for which practically nobody has been held responsible. Russia did not create the 2008 financial collapse: that happened through corrupt practices that greatly enriched financial institutions, after which all the culpable parties walked away unscathed, often even richer, while millions of Americans lost their jobs and were unable to replace them with equally good ones.

Russia did not instigate the moves that have reduced Americans’ trust in health authorities, environmental agencies, and other regulators. Russia did not create the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying firms that employ ex-politicians at handsome salaries. Russia did not defund higher education in the United States. Russia did not create the global network of tax havens in which big corporations and the rich can pile up enormous wealth while basic government services get cut.

These are the fault lines along which a few memes can play an outsize role. And not just Russian memes: whatever Russia may have done, domestic actors in the United States and Western Europe have been eager, and much bigger, participants in using digital platforms to spread viral misinformation.

Even the free-for-all environment in which these digital platforms have operated for so long can be seen as a symptom of the broader problem, a world in which the powerful have few restraints on their actions while everyone else gets squeezed. Real wages in the US and Europe are stuck and have been for decades while corporate profits have stayed high and taxes on the rich have fallen. Young people juggle multiple, often mediocre jobs, yet find it increasingly hard to take the traditional wealth-building step of buying their own home—unless they already come from privilege and inherit large sums.

If digital connectivity provided the spark, it ignited because the kindling was already everywhere. The way forward is not to cultivate nostalgia for the old-world information gatekeepers or for the idealism of the Arab Spring. It’s to figure out how our institutions, our checks and balances, and our societal safeguards should function in the 21st century—not just for digital technologies but for politics and the economy in general. This responsibility isn’t on Russia, or solely on Facebook or Google or Twitter. It’s on us.

“This has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and an offline world, and that what is said online is in some way kept online. I hope that this eliminates the conception from people’s minds.”
—
Renee DiResta, Stanford Internet Observatory, as quoted in Twitter and Facebook Lock Trump’s Accounts After Violence on Capitol Hill, by Kate Conger, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times, 6 January 2021

A referendum on reality itself

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally.

Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not — but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along — and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear — not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020

Four times the number of votes

In a Facebook experiment published in Nature that was conducted on a whopping 61 million people, some randomly selected portion of this group received a neutral message to “go vote,” while others, also randomly selected, saw slightly more social version of the encouragement: small thumbnail pictures of a few of their friends who reported having voted were shown within the “go vote” pop-up.

The researchers measured that this slight tweak — completely within Facebook's control and conducted without the consent or notification of any of the millions of Facebook users — caused about 340,000 additional people to turn out to vote in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections.

(The true number may even be higher since the method of matching voter files to Facebook names only works for exact matches.)

That significant effect—from a one-time, single tweak—is more than four times the number of votes that determined that Donald Trump would be the winner of the 2016 election for presidency in the United States.

From Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas (2017), page 157. The study published in Nature is available for free on PubMed Central here.