A formal invitation
The reason for this newsletter and why you should be interested in it...or obsessed with it.
What the heck is this newsletter?
This newsletter is your formal engraved invitation to join a conversation, a community, a movement. “We request the pleasure of your company…”
I’ll publish on a regular, or at least semi-regular, basis about the in-between times that we’re stuck in. New technologies have changed the world, but the world has struggled to adjust to those changes and we’re caught in between. This has happened before. Advances in technology and the creation of new industries during the Industrial Revolution led to the inequality and corruption of The Gilded Age. The Gilded Age was followed by the reforms of The Progressive Era, which created and adapted policies to address the needs of the new circumstances.
We’ve seen circumstances change again as technology has made giant leaps forward during the past few decades. The world has changed with the continuous developments of computing and the connection of that computing power to the internet. Maybe we’re still in the middle of it with the oncoming development of AI. We’ll only know in hindsight.
No matter where we are in the tech-development cycle, it’s a good time to start having the conversation about what kind of world we want to create, given the tech developments we’re living through. We can learn from ways the reforms of the Progressive Era challenged the excesses of the Gilded Age and modified the economic and political landscape to meet the realities of the Industrial Age. The issues we need to examine include the public benefits of education, the role of economic and political power in society and the need for an active government. The principles we should consider include equality, freedom and democracy.
These are the things that I’m thinking about and the topics I’ll be writing about. Perhaps you’re thinking about these issues too. If not, maybe I can get you to think about them.
Sometimes the posts will be irreverent. Sometimes they’ll be serious and a little bit dry. I tend towards the dry, but I’ll try to keep it light. The posts will vary in length. There will be times when a post will be a paragraph long and other times where it’s a lengthy essay. I also hope to mix current items with evergreen posts. I’m trying to approach this like a grand experiment in seeing what I can make happen by putting words on a screen and discussing the topics I’ve been thinking about. My dream is to build a community and conversation of people who are also thinking about these things. I would love to have you join the conversation.
I’ve already put out a few posts on this newsletter platform. Take a look at those. I’ll probably rework and republish them as I move forward. Subscribe to the newsletter, join the community and let me know what you think.