Dan's Notes / Issue 7: Hope for the future • New operating systems

Hi friends,

Only a few links today - my reading list was a bit empty this week.

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Hope for the Future

A transcript of a keynote from Audrey Watters, an education writer and self-described "Cassandra of ed-tech", on the importance of hope and why remembering the past is essential for imagining a better future.

"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." "It’s an extraordinary statement," Solnit writes, "one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. [...]

"Amnesia leads to despair in many ways," she continues. "The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change."

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We need new operating systems. Whose job is that?

A common theme in many of my links from the past few weeks is systems problems. The challenges we face today - climate, transportation, housing, labor - are not individual issues but collective issues, hamstrung by laws, regulations, and processes from a different era, designed to address a different set of challenges. Unpacking how these systems work - what drives them, what holds the status quo in place, where the leverage points are - is the key to figuring out how to change them.

We tend to overestimate the extent to which our problems are a particular function of particular individuals or groups, and underestimate the extent to which they are a function of the systems themselves; the behaviours they engender, the incentives they create and the markets they shape. It’s not the players, it’s the game. [...]

These systems are not natural. They are not just there. They are man-made. The platform upon which our society and economy is built is not a naturally-occurring substructure, but a kind of societal operating system; a stack of systems that has been built up over hundreds or thousands of years. [...] And if they were designed, that means they can be redesigned. To quote the late anthropologist David Graeber, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.” [...]

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Too Fast or Too Furious?

A transcript from an episode of The Politics of Everything podcast about road design, why car accident deaths in the US have gone up, and car culture in America.

To live in a place where you have to drive to do everything—you have to drive to go to work, to feed yourself and your family — that sucks. It really, genuinely does. One of the things that people tell me all the time is they want the freedom to drive. Well, I’ll tell you the real freedom is the freedom to not to have to drive.

See you next week,

Dan