[Edit: 8 weeks after I wrote this, the world went to hell].
Where were you at the dawn of this millennium?
I was fortunate to be standing on a posh Paris balcony, where ‘Le bug’ conspiracies were being dished out along with chilled Laurent Perrier. Tour Eiffel’s Millennium Clock had been ticking off seconds for a thousand days.
Then, five hours before the new century kicked in, it chose to glitch, taking any remaining optimism for technology down with it.
What I do remember of that moment is that 2000 didn’t really feel like the future: novel yes, but not necessarily inspiring, not… the future. The idea of 2000 broadly triggered more fear than optimism. (As for the dawn of 2010, did we even notice? It just sort of felt like a Thursday.)
In the first twenty years of this millennium, we’ve all grown up surrounded by our technologies and innovations. No longer novelties, we’ve expanded our expectations of them and redefined our roles through them. We’ve made them essential, even as these technologies baulked at coexisting with a social operating system installed before they were invented.
It’s not surprising that in that same twenty years, we’ve seen all the rules that propped up our Modernist systems collapse: creativity to business; education to employment; finance to nutrition; manufacturing to agriculture; culture to the community; parenting to politics. If Modernism was about installing universal truths into our social fabrics, Post Modernism seemed to be mostly about living with the consequences of their fractured promises.
We didn’t know the very idea of Modernity had its own built-in obsolescence.
In September of 2015, the United Nations ratified the 17 Sustainable Development Goals deemed essential to the ongoing prosperity and vitality of Earth and its inhabitants. In the years since it is clear that few have made the changes they promised.
Action is needed. Now. From all of us.
In coining this next decade as the Decade of Action, UN Secretary-General António Guterres is urging each of our planet’s citizens to step forward and see themselves as part of a solution.
I’ve spent my career as a rule breaker. Much like Joe the Dead in Westernlands, it's not that I felt they didn’t apply to me, it’s that they didn’t belong to me. I had no agency in their creation. I’m sure many of you have felt the same way.
The rules are all broken now, piled up like old beige tech, while the challenges of this next decade are existential: They belong to all of us.
We need to be rule-writers, not rule-breakers.
A few days ago, as I looked out into a crystal clear California night, I thought about the day I was on that Parisian balcony, and about the year ahead. And I realized this:
2020 feels like the future.
- in which we can fully harness bottom-up innovation, emergent design, and iterative content.
- in which we can embrace diversity in approach and outcome.
- in which we can value the ad hoc over the a priori.
- in which we can all step forward, as part of a solution.
2020 is the future. And in the future, everything is possible.
So I call on my friends and collaborators, fellow rule-breakers and rabble-rousers. Let’s use our talents and our energy and write a new future.
Happy New Year everyone.
[Wear a mask]
