Rather Suspect

How will we navigate the post-pandemic world? What’s the world going to look like after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, whatever the outcome? What do we need to do to mitigate the effects of climate change? What economic policies need to be put into place to deal with inflation?

Lately, things feel…bleak. Dark. Going in the wrong direction. These negative events are unfolding and it seems our job is just to figure out how to deal with them.

It’s like we’re all on a ship crossing the Atlantic and a storm has arisen, the boat has sprung a leak, and a third of our supplies have gotten swept overboard. It’s an “all hands on deck” moment where everyone is rushing around trying to patch the ship up, tying down the remaining supplies, and doing everything we can to keep the boat from capsizing.

This is part of how things go sometimes. When there’s a fire, you don’t have much choice. You have to put out the fire before moving on.

But the trouble today is many of our “fires” are broad and slow-burning. Climate change unfolds over decades. Dealing with pandemics takes years and involves billions of people. Inflation impacts seemingly hundreds of industries across an interconnected global economy. And global politics feels as challenging as ever.

And so trying to “fix” everything feels — hard. To me it does.

But one reason I believe it feels so hard is we’re not looking in the right direction. We’re reacting to things that have already happened rather that proactively creating scenarios that we wish to happen. It’s like we’ve forgotten the whole point of why we boarded the ship in the first place.

I don’t want to mitigate climate change. I want to design a planetary environment where energy is so clean, renewable and abundant that humans and the natural world thrive.

I don’t want to minimize inflation. I want to invent new economic systems where every human on the planet has their basic needs met and everyone (regardless of where they are born) has numerous opportunities to create and share what makes them the most happy.

I don’t want to just get past the latest pandemic and then continually worry about a future one. I want to dream up a set of scientific and healthcare systems wherein humans gain such a deep understanding of the building blocks of biology that the very idea of a pandemic fades into the past.

And I don’t want to deal with political issues in such a way that leads to massive military build-ups and a new Cold War. I want to create entirely new political and economic systems such that the very idea that destroying in order to gain “new territory” becomes ridiculous.

I don’t want to live in a post-pandemic, post-inflationary, post-Cold War, post-fossil fuel world. I want to retire the word “post” and replace it with “pre.” I want to live in a pre-thriving, pre-peaceful, pre-abundant world — and then I want to work as hard as I can to remove the word “pre” from all of these so that these goals become manifest as quickly as possible.

The 1920’s were called the Roaring Twenties. I think we need to define the 2020’s as the Thriving Twenties, the Innovation Twenties, the Breakthrough Twenties. I don’t want this to be the decade that came “after” so much trouble — I want this to be the decade that comes “before” so much joy.

Let’s imagine the next generation not asking “what was it like when the environment was so much better?” Let’s imagine them asking “how was it living through the most exciting time in recent history? Were you even aware at the time how great you were making everything?”

Why do people bother to vote?

I mean this question quite literally. It’s estimated that nearly 160 million votes were cast in the 2020 American presidential election. I was one of those who cast a vote, and so I moved the needle by 1/160 millionth.

Though of course that’s not quite true, as the Electoral College system makes it so that a vote cast in, say, Ohio has a much greater influence than a vote cast in, say, California. But even an Ohio voter’s ballot sat beside over 5.8 million others in the ballot box.

Which again begs the question: above a certain scale, why do people bother to vote? Or, to put it another way, why take an action when you know the maximum impact of you individual action is not just small, but trivially so?

But clearly at least 160 million people in the U.S. believe it’s worth it. Presumably they don’t think it’s worth it logically — but, rather, they believe in the fundamental story voting represents. That is, one might say: ours is a representative democracy, and in a representative democracy many of us believe it’s one’s duty and responsibility to vote.

What does all this have to do with climate change? Simply that it seems that — above a certain scale — numbers themselves begin to lose their ability to motivate people to action. Scientists publish a multitude of papers detailing the risks and consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels — but given there are nearly eight billion people on the planet today, it would seem that any individual choice would only have the most trivial of impact.

So how can people be motivated to action? If voting is any guide, there needs to be a story — one that doesn’t only describe the benefits of taking action, but also perhaps the duty and responsibility we might have — to each other, to future generations, to other species.

As the United States approaches its two-hundred and fiftieth year, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights still holds incredible sway over so many aspects of American life. Perhaps if the goal is for the planet to take significant action to address climate change, we need something of equal stature and power. We need something that speaks less to the scientific and economic impact and more to a set of common values — values that are resonant enough that people would be willing to sacrifice to uphold them.

If we wish people to act at scale, perhaps it’s time to write a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution or a Bill of Rights on behalf of the planet and its inhabitants.

What truths do we as humans on this planet hold to be self-evident? At a time where the globe feels so divided — is listing out those truths even possible?

Today I’d like to propose three questions:

1) Based purely on how you’ve used your smartphone over the last 24 hours, do you think Google, Apple, or another tech company could determine your location, at least to within a mile?

2) Based purely on your communication history — whether through social media sites, email, or messaging — do you think one or more of those tech companies could guess, with a reasonable degree of certainty, at least a few of the people you’ve spent the most time with over the past 48 hours?

3) Do you believe a set of developers could create an app, within, say, 60 days or less, which enabled you to share whether you tested positive for covid and post that information in a reasonably-anonymous way to a central database?

If you answered “yes” to the above three questions, then I’d like to propose a fourth:

4) Why is it that, over a two-year-long pandemic that impacted every person on the planet, there never arose features in any of the major tech platforms which alerted you personally when your own risk was rising or falling?

Yes, of course Apple and Google worked on the “notification” system you find on your phone today, and which was rolled out on a state-by-state basis. But why was that even necessary?

Given the companies already have the data listed above — and given they already use it to make recommendations around products and services you should purchase — why was it that data was never repurposed in a way to serve the global community as it fought the pandemic?

Imagine an alert appearing at the top of a Facebook feed, for example, stating “the risk in your own social network has risen recently — consider reducing your social interactions for the next ten days.” It seems such an indicator would have been well within any number of companies’ capacity to create. Was it that such a feature wouldn’t have been helpful? Or was it that these companies didn’t want to draw attention to the fact they have this level of detailed information already?

Crypto! Blockchain! NFTs! Bitcoin! Tokens!

The buzzwords of the hour — collectively called “Web3” — refer to a set of technologies that, depending upon who you ask, is either the Second Coming of the Messiah or a flaming digital paper bag of poo emojis. So which is it?

While I love the idea of my currency having a dog on it as much as the next person, instead of writing about how we’re so gonna totally crush it in crypto brah I thought I would write about the qualities of these technologies themselves. And rather than throw about vague, high-fallutin’ phrases like “the decentralized web,” I’m going to try to just get back to basics. Ready? Let’s see how this goes.

So let’s begin with the granddaddy of them all: the blockchain. What does the blockchain bring to the table? Well, at its core the blockchain is just a unique and somewhat counter-productive way of storing data. For decades we’ve been building databases which store huge amounts of information in such a way that we can fetch anything we want, at any time, in parallel. These databases are one of the fundamental reasons why services like Google can scale to serve billions.

But the blockchain is different. Rather than storing data in this massively parallel way, the blockchain stores every piece of information in serial — almost like a string of 1940s Christmas tree lights. And — just like those old-school lights — if you mess with one link in the chain, the entire string goes out.

Why, we might ask, after decades of building insanely-fast, parallel systems, would someone go back in time and create a slow and unwieldy system like this? Serial approaches are almost always worse than parallel approaches. It’s one reason we all hate calling those automated support systems (“press 1 for tech support, 2 for sales, 3 to get disconnected and have to call back four times”) rather than finding what we need on a website. Serial generally sucks.

But just like a pastry chef can make one interesting dessert out of vanilla and another out of cinnamon, so too can a programmer take advantage of the special qualities of this way of storing data to make something novel. Take Bitcoin. Because blockchain is one giant string of lights, it’s possible to create a type of “trusted currency” that’s built on this special kind of database. Because if you’re using this database to store and track value, it’s actually a strength that nobody can alter any individual item on that string. Thus, Bitcoin becomes a type of system that you can feel confident hasn’t been corrupted or hacked.

And from there we can dream up other types of Christmas tree lights (we’ll call them “tokens.”) For example, we can create something called an NFT which is basically just a fancy way of saying “here’s a special number that you can’t mess with.” NFTs are a sort-of social security number, built on the blockchain, that you can give to anything: a product, a document, a song, or some terrible artwork.

It’s at this point where someone with a name like hella-phat-techbro-yo.eth breathlessly says that because of blockchain, and bitcoin, and tokens, and NFTs, the entire world is gonna change omg don’t you get it? OMG YOU DON’T?!!? Because THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.

And the thing is — it kind of does change everything. But perhaps in a way that hasn’t quite been acknowledged properly.

One usual argument goes like this. Artists, writers, programmers and other creators made everything on the internet, but over the years, they didn’t get paid properly for their work. Instead, the powers that be used good old capitalism to muscle in and create closed, proprietary systems where formerly there were open and free ones. And because we now we’ll have a great way to track and store value digitally, this means — finally — that Tommy Joe sitting in his mother’s basement in Nashville playing bluegrass on his ukelele will get his due.

But what gets skipped over in this telling is that the best parts of the internet were never built on capitalism.

The whole promise of the internet from the start was about inter-operability. Anyone, anywhere could connect a computer to this open and immensely-scalable network, and billions upon billions of computers could run alongside each other in parallel. From there, of course, anyone could start to publish information — from writing, to images, to music — and that information could get copied, shared, and replicated to anyone, anywhere — again, in parallel. Imperfect but open protocols quickly arose to support different types of content, from low-level data packets to higher-level offerings like email messages and web pages.

Which is to say, the early internet wasn’t modeled on compensation, it was built on the concept of sharing freely. The open source movement, for example, led to an entire stack of key technologies that are driving this very blog.

This idea goes beyond just payment for work. This ethos is quite literally built into every machine, every operating system, every file storage system. Because apps are just a set of digital bits, you can create one copy of that app or a billion — and the billionth copy is exactly the same as the first. It’s just as good. You can read this blog post and, if you like it, “Select-All” on the text you’re looking at, copy it to an editor, and save it locally to your own computer — and these words will be exactly what I’ve written here.

Everything has been designed to be easy-to-copy, easy-to-edit, easy-to-share. In this way, the vast majority of the internet is one big free-for-all kumbaya commons. What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine — so let’s pour ourselves a drink and sit by the campfire, shall we?

But, of course, that’s not what things feel like today. And why not? Well, along the way a set of companies decided they wanted to leverage these technologies to make some money. But just because a company sells their product or service on the internet doesn’t mean it’s of the internet, any more than my setting up a lemonade stand on a publicly-funded sidewalk makes me “part of the sidewalk ecosystem.” In this scenario I’m simply taking advantage of a freely-available community resource and using it to drive traffic to my business.

Now the fact these companies did this has led to the (often very negative) consequence of many individual creators not getting properly compensated for their work. And those that do often have to work with these large firms, just like a 1950s musician had to partner with a record label for their work to get distributed. Whether it’s programmers paying through the nose to Apple and Google to list on their app stores, or musicians making pennies on the dollar for their music to get streamed on Spotify, the fundamental economics are the same as ever.

And so if that’s the case, isn’t it so great that these new tokens will make it so that anyone can’t just copy a file (whether a song, an app, some writing, or a piece of art) and use it for themselves? Catch you later, Spotify! No way you can copy my music files in any old way you like anymore!

So yes, of course this truly is very valuable. Providing people with a way to track, store, manage — and get compensated — for their work potentially does tip the tables in favor of the individual creator. And how can anyone argue with that?

But I want to acknowledge that in this breathless rush to “Web3” something has gotten lost, and it’s simply this. Web3 isn’t the “next step” in the web — it’s a different web entirely, constructed with a different philosophy and different core values. It’s not an “evolution” of the earlier web any more than capitalism is an “evolution” to, say, socialism.

The fact this isn’t a linear step doesn’t mean it’s better or worse — only that it will lead to different outcomes, and it may not be possible to align those outcomes with the outcomes of a different system. I might be able to organize two hundred volunteers to walk the beach and pick up trash on a Saturday morning. And I might be able to hire two hundred people for $50 each to do the same. I’m just not sure I can do these simultaneously.

So what’s the point of this post? For me, I think to start we should just get our naming down. It’s not that there was the first “web,” and then “Web 2.0” and now “Web3.” It’s that we’re talking about three fundamentally different things, and these won’t evolve so much as co-exist.

To that end, I’m going to name these three things the Collective Web, the Corporate Web, and the Compensation Web.

The Collective Web — what I’ll also call the “free web” — describes not just a set of technologies, but an approach to how those technologies should get designed, built, distributed and used. Think of the Collective Web as Linux, Apache, email, Wikipedia, open source, and Mozilla — but also the random text thread, the “check out this photo of a dog and a chicken,” the blog post and the funny video. This web is about things that are free-to-use, free-to-share, and free-to-extend. Using these tools are like being part of the commons, like visiting a park or driving down the highway.

The Corporate Web describes that set of services we use (and, frankly, are frequently abused by) over the past ten or twenty years. These services are not — and never were — “part of the web.” Like shopping malls you visit by driving on a community-funded highway, they are simply commerce services that take advantage of our collective investment. Examples here of course abound — from Amazon to Google, Netflix to Spotify, Facebook to Snapchat. Each of these is a set of proprietary, closed software systems more similar to Microsoft Windows of 1995 than to Wikipedia of 2022. The fact that we happen to use these proprietary systems using a web browser doesn’t really change things.

Finally, the Compensation Web describes this new set of “Web3” technologies like blockchain, bitcoin, and NFTs. We might also call this the “personal web” or maybe the “worker web.” The Compensation Web is anything that enables — at its core — an individual to assign and manage value in the way that works for them. There no doubt has been and will be incredible innovation here, from the building of new types of financial exchanges all the way to barter economies and everything in between.

The questions as I see it moving forward are both impressive and challenging. I believe the hope — and I share this too — is that the web can evolve to a place where we get to continue to participate and enjoy the amazing innovations the Collective Web has produced and also experience the benefits of the Compensation Web. And perhaps it’s that combination can free us from what most certainly feels like the tyranny of the Corporate Web.

But there won’t be a shift, from one, to the next, to the next. Instead, we’ll find ourselves using these three “webs” simultaneously, in parallel. And will these three be able to overlap, or will they have to remain independent from each other? This is what I’m curious to see.

There are at least two fundamental parts to every social media business.

The first and most visible part is the service that invites you to share what’s on your mind. When designed well, these experiences make you feel like you’re at a party, someone’s just handed you a microphone, and the crowd is yelling “speech! Speech!” The room goes quiet and all eyes are on you. If you’re an extravert, perhaps this feels exhilarating. If you’re more introverted, perhaps it’s anxiety-inducing. But no matter what, there’s a power to that feeling.

But of course we all know there’s that second part — the invisible part — that is about distributing the content you post. And note the transformation. Your witty quip, your heartfelt response, your photo from last night’s dinner out that makes you smile? Each has been reduced, simply, into content.

Instagram isn’t a gallery where you hang your latest work. Facebook isn’t a hushed writer’s salon where you stop in to write a few paragraphs. TikTok isn’t a sound stage where you try out that new comedy routine you’ve been practicing. Or, rather, they’re designed to feel like this — but, in fact, they’re all just the visible facades for the invisible machinery behind the scenes.

The invisible machinery’s job is not to distribute content in order to, as Mark Zuckerberg says, “bring people together.” The invisible machinery’s job is to make money. And in order to do that, your ideas and feelings need to be turned into products.

But how do you turn something as inherently fuzzy as an idea or a feeling into a product? You need to deconstruct it, quantify it, and package it up so it can be sold through a transaction on a marketplace.

Transactions tend to fit nicely into well-defined boxes. The best are discrete, quantifiable, and short-term. The products that encourage the largest number of transactions have an end-date. In fact, ideally a product expires soon so that it must be purchased quickly.

But what if you’re dealing with something that can’t be deconstructed? What if you’re looking to truly connect with another human — to build and strengthen a bond of mutual respect, admiration, or even love, over time — how does one go about breaking that down into a set of parts?

Or what if you have strong feelings not towards an individual but towards a community? What you’re trying to contribute authentically — whether through openness and vulnerability, sacrifice, or collective work towards a common cause? Is it even possible to deconstruct those types of connections?

Because the trouble with those sorts of feelings is they resist being made transactional. They aren’t discrete, they can’t be quantified, and — perhaps most importantly — they aren’t short-term. In fact, it’s not just that they’re long-term — it’s that they’re designed to last forever. We don’t search for those feelings in the works of Shakespeare, Rumi, or Mary Oliver to help us complete a transaction. We look to them because their words are timeless.

And machines do not do well with the timeless.

And so, we’re faced with two concepts that would seem to be incompatible. As humans, we want to share the timeless, to build deep relationships, grow vibrant communities, work towards creating cultures that last forever. But the machines we’re using actively try to break those things down, to deconstruct them in ways so that the pieces and parts of these ideas can be bought and sold like so many fidget spinners.

How do we make these two concepts work together?

Well, if we act consciously, we intentionally place machines into their proper role. We create structures and technologies in which these quantified transactions serve us. Take, for example, a university, with a campus, classes, grades, administrators — and all the machinery of a formal system whose job (theoretically) is to help preserve, share, and spread a culture’s lasting ideas. Or think of a well-run farmer’s market, where buyers and sellers congregate to perform as many mutually-beneficial transactions as possible on a given Saturday morning — and in so doing, help make the community more self-sufficient and sustainable.

But what happens if we participate unconsciously in such a way that these roles get reversed? That is, what happens when we act so that the culture doesn’t control the marketplace, but where we elevate the marketplace and try to “fit” culture inside of it?

It doesn’t work. Marketplaces, by definition, deconstruct and reduce. They make things smaller. They’re not designed to facilitate long-term, difficult-to-define connections. They are machines designed to optimize transactions that complete.

But by placing so much on our social media platforms we’ve found ourselves — most likely unconsciously — trying to create and grow our culture through what are, at their core, simply marketplaces. Given this, should it be any surprise that many teenage girls (as just one example) encounter mental health issues when using Instagram?

The platform isn’t designed to build them up. It’s designed to break them down.

So as we look toward designing the next generation of our idea-sharing web platforms, three questions. What will it take to create platforms that don’t deconstruct, but encourage growth? That don’t treat long-term connections as one-time transactions? And that help us — individually and as a community — create things that last?

What is required to live with a large group of strangers?

We crave excitement, the promise of the new. But in order to find that among other humans, we must place ourselves amongst those we don’t know. Sometimes that means we move to big cities, filled with opportunity but also traffic, crowds, expense. And over time, we train ourselves to interact with each other in an entirely new way.

One part of this training involves becoming more human, extending a smile to a stranger. But one part involves the opposite of this, the staring blankly into space on the subway so as to not attract unwanted attention.

What should we call this approach, this way of being? For lack of a better word I’ll call it “anti-empathy” — the conscious avoiding of connection with another human. It sounds cold, villainous even — but I don’t think it’s either. Our brains are simply not wired to take in too many humans in a given day.

The philosopher Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do makes the case that we cannot ignore others’ suffering simply because they are distant. To illustrate, Singer uses a thought experiment involving a drowning child. If you walked by a three-year-old in a lake who was calling for help, would you save them? No doubt you would. Now, what if that child were fifty yards away? A hundred? At what physical distance does your moral obligation end?

Singer’s point is simply: if we know there is suffering in the world but we don’t see it in our immediate vicinity, that does not make it moral to ignore that suffering. His claim, in fact, is that it is immoral for any of us to not continually work to alleviate that suffering of as many people as we can, no matter where in the world they reside.

I’d like to add an additional dimension to Singer’s thought experiment, not to counter his approach, but to explore an additional question, one I think maps to an emotional feeling that many of us encounter in the modern world.

Imagine that you came around the bend in the woods and you didn’t encounter a single child drowning in a lake — you encountered hundreds. What should you do in that situation?

At first, you might rush out to rescue one child and bring her to shore. Then, you run back into the water to rescue another. And then another. But then what?

Then, of course — you create a system. You yell for help. You attract others to your cause. Together, you organize. Who are the strongest swimmers? Who can construct a raft, perhaps out of some logs on the shore? How can we approach this problem so that we are working to save as many children as possible as quickly as possible?

We do this all the time in our society of course. We launch non-profits, start government programs, deploy NGOs. We raise money to buy equipment and staff rescue missions. If thousands of children are drowning it is, of course, more effective to save as many children as possible in a way that scales — not one at a time.

No doubt Singer would approve of this approach, as through it we adhere to his “effective altruism” approach to morality — we work to do the most good we can do. But — as we scale our work, I would ask: at what point has our focus fundamentally shifted? At what point does the bulk of our emotional energy turn from saving the child to building the machine?

When faced with large problems, humans are naturally tuned to create tools to solve problems that are just too big to solve one-on-one. We design machines — whether organizational structures or technological advances — to do what we previously did with our own hands. But at what point, exactly, does our focus — our passion, our heart, the core thing that drives us — transform from our “humanity” to our “machinery?”

Because that shift must happen. In order to save thousands of children drowning in the lake, there is no other way to do it. But there is a subtle Faustian bargain that occurs along the way. We don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to keep an eye on each child and still do the best job we can at raising the money, leading the organization, buying the life preservers, outfitting the boats. And when we make that shift — from serving an individual human to constructing a machine to serve as many humans as we can — we transform. We make a trade. In exchange for gaining the power of systems, of scale — we give up our humanity, our empathy. Not out of coldness, or malice — but simply because our brains can only process so much information at a time.

So we trade — intentionally — that empathy for mechanical and technological achievement. We replace love with ambition, care with progress, connection with success. We measure Key Performance Indicators, track to objectives, celebrate the fact that “poverty levels” have dropped worldwide — without actually having to encounter anyone in poverty. We save thousands of children from shore, directing an armada of ships.

Just to reiterate: this is not a judgement. Quite the opposite, it’s simply an exploration of the question: is it inevitable that we must give up our humanity (at least in part) in order to scale? Should any of us find ourselves under a surgeon’s knife, don’t we want that surgeon to treat us cooly, rationally, perhaps almost mechanistically? Don’t we want her hand to be trained by formal systems and rational practices developed over time through rigorous, thoughtful university and healthcare systems? No doubt we do.

So that is not the question. The question instead might be: is it even possible for that surgeon to maintain her personal connection to each of her patients without becoming overwhelmed?

Or, to return to the example of our crowded city: is it even possible, for any of us, to stop each time we encounter someone on the street and help them? Or — in order to help more people, to do the most good we can do — must we trade-in our emotional system, the one that empathizes with a fellow human in pain? Must we put that empathy upon a shelf, to return to it later — so that, right now, we can take off the shelf the cold, rational tools we need to do the job properly?

In order to connect with one fellow human, we dive deeply into our humanity. But to connect with all of our fellow humans, we must connect with our machinery.

We must become emotional cyborgs.

How do you put an elephant on a diet?

In 2015, a hundred and ninety-six countries signed The Paris Agreement, whose goal is to limit the rise in global mean temperature to well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and preferably below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to pre-industrial levels.

Last week, federal scientists from several agencies, including the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and NASA, forecast that sea levels will rise by about a foot by 2050.

On Monday, during an American Geophysical Union Meeting, scientists warned that a key Antarctic glacier could shatter within the next five years and increase the glacier’s contribution to global sea level rise to 25%.

My response to each of these statistics is: so what?

Now, to be clear, I am not a climate change denier. My issue with the above data has nothing to do with the underlying science itself. It’s that, as reported, each of these numbers feels inconsequential and meaningless.

Let’s start with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the increase in the global temperature to less than 3.6 degrees. How should I interpret that information?

I’ll tell you how I think about it. When I look at my phone right now, it says the temperature outside is 65 degrees. That said, were you to blindfold me, lead me outside, and, after a minute, ask me to guess the temperature — I very likely could guess correctly within about 4 degrees or so. I might say 67, or 65, or perhaps 63 — but I would most certainly say “it’s in the 60s.”

Why is this important? Because whether it’s 67 degrees or 63 degrees, it makes almost no difference to my life. I don’t dress differently if it’s one or the other. I don’t spend more time preparing myself before I step outside. I don’t warm up the car for longer if I go for a drive. I quite literally do nothing differently in either case.

Now, that’s all well and good when it’s in the 60s. But what if it were instead, say, in the 20s? I grew up in Minnesota and I can tell you if outside it were, say, 27 degrees instead of 23? I would also do nothing differently.

Now, of course — intellectually — I know that the mean temperature everywhere rising 3.6 degrees is extremely significant. But I don’t live everywhere. Nobody lives everywhere. We live in San Francisco, or Minneapolis, or Miami, or Mexico City. If you asked anyone, in any of those places, what they would do differently if today turned out to be 4 degrees warmer than they thought it might have been when they left the house in the morning — do you think any of them would change their behavior in any meaningful way?

If the answer is no, then why would we think that eight billion people will react to those goals, as stated? Scientists can describe (through models, scientific papers, and essays) why these numbers are very, very bad. But in terms of a felt sense, they just don’t feel very bad.

But perhaps temperature isn’t the number to key on. So, instead, let’s talk about that sea level rise: sea levels will rise a foot by 2050. How do we react to that number?

I hate to say it but, in terms of a “felt” sense? My response is, again: a foot? Over thirty years? That’s it?

Now, why should I be so dismissive about this number? Because I know — in fact, I’ve experienced, hundreds of times, in person — the Pacific Ocean rising and falling, from high tide to low tide, perhaps seven or eight feet every day. When I’m on the beach and the sea rises a foot, I don’t call that a crisis. I call that sitting by the water on a Tuesday afternoon.

But let’s talk to the last item: a major glacier fracturing in the Antarctic. That glacier’s contribution to sea level rise will increase from 4% to 25%. Now, that seems like a lot — but, in this case, I have no context to determine if that is, in fact, significant. I know so little about Antarctica, about how frequently glaciers do or do not crack, about how much they contribute to sea level rise — in fact, I have no idea where to place this information.

Now, of course, the initial response to all the above might be: well, you need to educate yourself! Do the research. Read the scientific papers, spend the time realising that a 3.6 degree rise in temperature will likely have disastrous consequences! Understand that a one-foot sea level rise maps to entire communities getting submerged, to hundreds of millions of people getting displaced! And read up on the ice shelf, and understand just how significant these changes are!

To which my response is: yes, that is absolutely correct. In fact, I can and should read the research. I should go deep on those scientific papers. I should spend the time educating myself on what very well may be the most significant event of the century. I’m not disagreeing with that. But, I do have to ask: if our goal is to inspire and motivate eight billion people to change their behavior — does it seem effective that every person on the planet needs to do the same?

It’s not that we’re getting the science wrong. It’s that we’re presenting the math wrong.

Edward Tufte, statistician and professor emeritus at Yale University once wrote that the first question one must ask when presented with any number is: compared to what? To that I would add a second qualification: compared to what other number that I already have a felt sense about?

Politicians of course are legendary at communicating data in such a way that they mean nothing to an average citizen. If one voter were presented with, say, a state bond measure that was estimated to cost $9 billion, and another that was estimated to cost $12 billion, how would a voter possibly make a decision between the two? With the exception of perhaps a few hundred of the wealthiest people on the planet, nobody really knows what a difference of three billion dollars feels like.

So, what’s the answer? In the bond measure above, one potential answer is easy: divide the cost of the project by the total number of taxpayers. Rather than say “this measure will cost $9 billion and this alternative measure will cost $12 billion” say “this measure will cost the average taxpayer $450 each, whereas this second one will cost $600 each.” Many of us know how an extra $150 feels. We can place that number not just in the context of other government programs which we might be asked to vote upon, we can understand how that impacts our lives. We know — without the need to do any research — how much gas, or how many groceries, or how many pairs of socks $150 can buy. We can “fit” this number into our lives, and then make informed decisions around it.

In other words: we don’t just know what that number means intellectually, we know how that number feels — in a very personal sense.

So I propose we need to treat the numbers we use when speaking about climate change in a similar way. If we are going to try to accomplish a goal whose success will be achieved by a specific, numerical, global goal — holding the planet’s mean temperature rise to less than 3.6 degrees — we need to break that number down into other numbers that are local, meaningful, and personal.

“You won't need a physical TV. It will just be a $1 hologram from some high school kid halfway across the world.” So gloats Mark Zuckerberg in his original announcement of Facebook’s newest initiative, the Metaverse.

At that point I thought: who would immerse themselves into a three-dimensional, all-encompassing sensory experience just to watch TV?

Zuckerberg says this newest innovation is “about bringing people together.” Which — according to the launch video — is apparently best accomplished by donning digital clothes (he chooses what appear to be some ninja-like black pajamas) and attending a meeting on the bridge of a spaceship.

On this conference-room-turned-UFO, he and colleagues ooh and ahh over a three-dimensional screensaver that seems to be made entirely of swimming pool noodles. Later, he explains how future versions of work will involve each of us sitting at a virtual desk and looking at virtual screens while our virtual coworker holograms walk by and make strange virtual faces at us.

While I’m sure it’s taken some impressive engineering to accomplish the above: this is not the Matrix I’ve been waiting for.

Switching form factors — for example, from desktop PCs to laptops, from laptops to mobile devices, or from mobile devices to VR glasses — is a very big deal. These switches often make an experience more lightweight, more portable, less expensive, and thus more accessible and ubiquitous. But — when we make a form factor switch — we also need to switch the metaphors we use in designing experiences for those new devices.

Early computers ran programs. Later, we used our machines to browse websites. Then our mobile devices evolved to run apps. You might say, aren’t these just technical distinctions for what are basically just different ways of running the same code? From an engineering perspective, yes — but to the end-users these metaphors are, in fact, quite different.

For example, let’s examine one of the most-used mobile apps ever: Uber. With Uber, I open the app, request a car, and I’m done. Behind-the-scenes of course, my phone’s GPS has determined my location, sent this to the Uber servers, summoned the nearest driver, sent the request to their phone, and booked a one-time, just-in-time transaction. I don’t spend time in Uber like I might in a program like, say, Microsoft Excel.

What does this have to do with the Metaverse? Simply this: when we transition form factors, it’s most often best to drop all the legacy metaphors and embrace what can uniquely be done with the new system. My iPhone is a GPS-enabled, high-quality digital camera with an onboard computer — making it exceptionally good not only at hailing a ride but at taking and sharing photographs, firing off quick texts and notes to friends, finding the nearest coffee shop, or getting directions to a cocktail bar. It fully embraces its concepts of location, photos, identity, and real-time, always-on connection. Now, imagine if one tried to implement Uber with laptop-native metaphors like files, folders, hard drives, and documents.

This is where I think many initial discussions around the Metaverse fall down. Talking about sitting at an “office” and looking at a “screen” in the Metaverse is like proposing that you should summon your Uber driver by uploading a new document to the Uber ride-request repository. It sounds silly because the device has no need for those old metaphors.

What might a Metaverse look like that embraces its unique capabilities? Let’s start by naming a few of them:

1. Immersiveness. No other form factor — with the possible exception of the cinema screen at your local movie theater — surrounds you with an experience quite like Virtual Reality headsets.

2. Navigability. Our programs and websites allow us to navigate through a very small and fixed set of menus, buttons, hyperlinks and (sometimes) voice commands. But in a virtual world? You can “go” anywhere you like, whenever you like.

3. Point-of-View Flexibility. Whether you are looking at a computer screen, an iPad, or an iPhone, physically you’re always in front of a lighted rectangle, and that spatial relationship never changes. But if you feel you’re inside of an immersive world, what other perspectives open up?

If we take the above — immersiveness, navigability, and fresh points-of-view — and combine them, where might this lead?

First, we can do away with all of our previous metaphors. Whether on the living room wall or the office desk, there is no need for screens. In fact, we need not even talk about location. We can replace this core idea of “I am in front of” with “we are inside of.” And that leads to something entirely new, because: to disconnect from the Screen means we can disconnect from the Self.

Up until now, because of the physical constraints of always having a screen in front of our eyes, a key design criteria was always managing the human-to-machine interaction. But if we remove that constraint — and, with virtual reality headsets, we can — now we can transition from human-(to-machine)-to-human interactions into human-with-human interactions.

With our new virtual reality headsets, the spatial metaphors describing our interactions can open up dramatically. We can immerse ourselves in new experiences in which I dissolves into we — here dissolves into everywhere and nowhere — and our differences dissolve into our similarities.

Let’s imagine how that might work. You don a VR headset and, instead of “you” acting out “your” avatar living inside of “your” virtual home — you find yourself instead, instantly, part of an avatar governed by a collective. For example, imagine being part of a giant blue whale swimming, slowly, through the deep, cold Pacific. But this whale isn’t just you — as tens of thousands of others are, at the same time, also part of this whale.

Individually, you’re less like the “brain” inside this whale and more like a few neurons. You have influence but not control. So you must learn, from others: what is our collective goal? What are our whale’s desires? What is it looking for, searching for? Those desires are both up to you and not up to you — as you are no more in charge of this particular avatar than your fingertip is in charge of your body.

But why do this? Just because it would make a cool art project? Perhaps. But I think there are many more applications these new Metaverse metaphors can unlock. For example: if we — eight billion souls and growing on this Earth — are looking for new ways to solve our climate change problems — why don’t we create virtual environments where we “feel” the tension of eight billion individuals? Alternatively, why don’t we shift our point of view so that we may “become” the greenhouse gas layer itself, and experience — in a felt sense — how we are shifting around the planet? Or, alternatively yet, why don’t we create collective avatars where we — all of us — become the Pacific Ocean, or the Amazon rainforest, or the Antarctic — and let’s all feel what it’s like for a miles-long chunk of our ice shelf to fall into the ocean?

If we participate in these experiences as a whole, together — perhaps we can leverage the Metaverse to start making decisions, as a whole, together.

Years ago, many people wrote that the promise of virtual reality was that we could use the technology to create Empathy Machines. I propose we — all of us — recenter our thinking around the Metaverse and work to create a set of systems that allow us to leverage these new metaphors to expand our sense of who “we” are.

This is the Matrix I want. How do we go about building this?