Future Now
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Not a Form but a Philosophy of Our Time - Part 2
Part 2 of 4
Waking up at 6am, balancing coffee cups bleary eyed, we began every day gathered in the dome car to hear a mentor speak. A bit like putting on virtual reality glasses with a 360 degree panorama view of the countryside, the ecstasy of the natural scenery mingled with some of the great voices of our time.
"The only thing we can be certain of is change," advised mentor Michael H. Oreskes, Managing Editor of the Associated Press, speaking as Chicago rapidly receded behind him. Even more will change in the next 25 years—this will undermine democracy if we remain fragmented, he said.
With no wifi on the train during the longer stretches of travel, we unplugged from the aether of constant connectivity to sit face-to-face and reflect on the rapid change that's already happened in our generation's short lifetimes. Talking with fellow participant Autumn Carter, Executive Director of California Commonsense, about the recent Open Data policy passed in Hawai'i, we discussed citizen engagement in the context of a digital government.
"Technology and open data aren't enough to fix the problems we face with our government," she said. "We need to focus on human-to-human communication."
Robert Reid, travel writer for the Lonely Planet covering the ride, made the remark somewhere in Iowa that "anytime there's people, you have travel, whether you walk outside your doorstep, or go halfway around the world." Similarly, anytime you have people, you have governance—the verb, not the noun—the active and continuous organization of social human beings. As a political designer, it makes sense to hold that human interaction paramount.
The importance of human association echoed across the train tracks, from San Francisco's [ freespace ] to Stage 2, a bar in North Omaha.
In the depths of [ freespace ], I held my first discussion with the Inventor's Toolkit. Tall ceilings, mismatched furniture, a 10 foot poster of the Earth from space with Institute for the Future’s Buckminster Fuller poster gazing benevolently at the group, we began by agreeing upon the assumption that we are innately social creatures. We have a desire to belong, intricately tethered to complex needs which we must fulfill—arguably, that we’re unable to fulfill solely on our own.
Sitting at Stage 2's bar in North Omaha after visiting the Malcolm X birth site, soul music crooning in the background, this sentiment got reinforced when I present the Inventor's Toolkit to the middle aged African American bartender.
"Governance?" she had asked confused, eyebrows furrowed.
"Yes, but let's start from the beginning—what is one element of your life that is most important to you?"
"Community," was her instant response, the others at the bar nodded.
Recent memories from earlier that afternoon came to mind, when I was talking with the manager of the Malcolm X Foundation.
"We are forced to live under oppressive systems," he told me as we gazed over the rural fields behind Malcolm X's birthsite, a place where the Ku Klux Klan once roamed.
Under oppressive systems, how do we survive? Our community, our associations with others, the creation of informal social systems.
Talking with Mike Roy, senior designer at Maya, a design consultancy and research lab in Pittsburgh, he pointed out the codified information base of the world is believed to double every 11 hours. Within a couple of years, there will be over a trillion devices connected to the global network.
If interactions with others humans is paramount, and pervasive computing is rapidly developing, how can we shape our technology—and government—to make our associations with others as fruitful and fulfilling as possible?
Each of us must become social inventors.
For More Information
- Governance Futures Lab
- Governance Futures Lab and the Millennial Trains Project
- Social Inventor's Toolkit
Lindsea K. Wilbur is an IFTF Research Affiliate.