“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.

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.

Huxley and Orwell

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacies to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985. (via 20th anniversary Edition, published 2005. Page XIX.)

Leaving Mumbai

After 4 years on the project and a year as Director I’ve packed my bags and said goodbye, for now, to my fabulous friends, colleagues and community at the Museum of Solutions (MuSo), Mumbai. Thank you! I am overwhelmed by your kindness and generosity and I’ve learned more from you than you’ll ever know!

It was a privilege to help nurture this new museum and its library (LiSo, the Library of Solutions) from concept to reality; to help build and lead the founding team; and to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to our new state-of-the-art building — “a world-class space to champion the art of finding solutions,” as a reviewer at Condé Nast Traveler recently put it — unique in Mumbai and India, if not the world.

Four years ago Tanvi Jindal, MuSo’s founder, asked if I would help her think about a new “museum of solutions” she was envisioning for the site of an old industrial building in the middle of Mumbai.

How could we create a new kind of museum in one of the world’s largest and most challenging cities to catalyze action for the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, foster new approaches to education, and help young people make meaningful change in the world together?

…And could we also make it fun?

Though Mumbai and India were new to me, this question of museums, play, and civic impact was not. Through years of work with the Smithsonian Institution, the U.N., and other cultural and civil-society conveners around the world I’ve been part of a decades-long movement to *flip the script* on traditional museum practice and help people use their own cultural institutions as platforms for the public good.

And this moment demands nothing less.

With a population of 22 million, Mumbai is indicative of the world’s 40+ megacities (cities with over 10 million inhabitants). Along with megacities like Shanghai, Jakarta, Paris, and L.A., Mumbai is home to daunting social and environmental problems — as well as astonishing creativity and drive. But the problems and the vitality often seem to live in different worlds.

Mumbai is India’s financial capital but over half of its residents live in slums. It is India’s innovation and creative hub (Bollywood! The city of dreams!) but many of its neighborhoods will be underwater by midcentury, drowned by rising seas due to climate change. Education is highly valued, but it is predominantly structured around rote memorization and test achievement, not the world as we see it today.

Young people are often caught in the middle of this dynamic, squeezed between a daily fight for survival, antiquated educational and social systems, and their own profound abilities to see and create a future filled with beautiful change.

Furthermore, young people — all people — have a fundamental human right to be involved in the decisions that will affect their futures, but too few conveners will help them find their way.

If we can learn to solve problems in places like Mumbai we stand a good chance of surviving and thriving in the 21st century. Museums like MuSo can be a kind of civic infrastructure in this regard. By being bold, inclusive, and action-oriented — rooted in reality but also participatory and fun — we can bring people together to build social capital and elevate everyone’s ability to imagine and build a future that is joyous, sustainable, and just.

What’s next for me? I don’t know — I’m still catching up on sleep and processing what I’ve learned! But with any luck, I’ll keep working in this direction: young people and their grownups in vital civic spaces, enthralled by the chance to play and explore together — making life better one small solution at a time.

//

This text is a slightly expanded version of this post on LinkedIn.

We have been working with amazing young people here in Hawai'i. [...] The young people today, they are determined. They understand what's happening to their planet, and they are committed to advocating for a better future for them and generations to come.
Julia Olson, as quoted in Young climate activists just won a ‘historic’ settlement by Victoria Bisset, Washington Post. June 28, 2024. I've ligtly edited/shortened Olson's quote.
Olson is the co-executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children's Trust, which has been representing young people in lawsuits claiming that government inaction (or worse) has violated young people's right to a clean environment. The article outlines a “historic” settlement between youth activists and the state of Hawai'i that requires the state to “cut its transportation sector’s planet-warming pollution and to consult with young people about its climate impact.”

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.

Gone

“The Molokaʻi creeper is among the eight Hawaiian birds that were officially declared extinct on Sept. 29. (Jeremy Snell/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum)” — Washington Post

“The Molokaʻi creeper is among the eight Hawaiian birds that were officially declared extinct on Sept. 29. (Jeremy Snell/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum)” — Washington Post

“Among the eight Hawaiian birds officially declared extinct Wednesday are the prismatic Maui ’akepa and Moloka’i creeper, and curve-beaked Kaua’i ʻakialoa and nukupu’u. Also gone is the Kaua’i ’o’o, whose haunting, flutelike mating call was last heard three decades ago.”
Ivory-billed woodpecker officially declared extinct, along with 22 other species, by Dino Grandoni. Washington Post, 29 September 2021.

Other things

“In giving us a glimpse of financial freedom, 2020 also robbed us of pretenses and excuses. If we are not doing a global vaccine plan, it is not for lack of funds. It is because indifference, or selfish calculation — vaccinate America first — or real technical obstacles prevent us from ‘actually’ doing it. It turns out that budget constraints, in all their artificiality, had spared us from facing the all-too-limited willingness and capacity for collective action. Now if you hear someone arguing that we cannot afford to bring billions of people out of poverty or we cannot afford to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, we know how to respond: Either you are invoking technological obstacles, in which case we need a suitably scaled, Warp Speed-style program to overcome them, or it is simply a matter of priorities. There are other things you would rather do.”
What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?, by economic historian Adam Tooze. New York Times, September 1, 2021

A sting in the tail

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

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

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

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

German Federal Cultural Foundation Digital Fund

german cultural foundation.png

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

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

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

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

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

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