Hi you,
I spend a lot of time in this space talking about what’s wrong: the surveillance, the power grabs, the systems designed to keep us reactive and isolated. That’s real and it’s necessary. But it’s not the whole story, and it’s definitely not where I want to leave you.
So today I want to share something different. Just over five years ago, someone at a Google event asked me what world I actually wanted to live in, and I riffed an answer on the spot about the good future I’ve been working toward ever since. Clean water, good music, a housing search that sorts by carbon footprint and the knowledge that we already have more power to write the story we want to live in than anyone who came before us.
The best way to experience the words is to watch, listen, and feel them above. But if you want to sit with the language itself, here’s the full text:
I want to live in a world where cars don’t make any noise, where the water is safe to drink for everybody, where the air is clean and the music is good.
I want to live in a world where we all got enough to eat and a quality place to sleep, and some people have fancier sheets, of course, but we all got a quality place to sleep.
I want to live in a world where we can celebrate someone else’s win and not interpret it as our loss, because we created rules where that is actually true and not a charitable thing to do, but profitable for you too, because profit doesn’t drive everything we do.
I want to live in a world where we have statues to Greta Thunberg and not turncoats like Stonewall Jackson.
I want to live in a world where I can go to a housing search platform like Zillow or Redfin and sort by carbon footprint, because location matters, but contribution to the grid matters even more, and I will buy that solar powered greenhouse with potential to contribute over the other options.
I want to live in a world where I can say that, and like Jean Luc Picard, make it so.
Where I don’t depend on the charity and the goodwill and the whimsy of someone at a place like Google to do that, but I have the tools to apply and remix this power and create the story I want to live in.
Make my own Zillow. Roll my own sorting function. Because it should be possible.
I want to live in a world where we recognize that the world we live in is a story, and that increasingly, the access we have to this world is mediated by digital story, and therefore, in a digital story written world, I have even more tools, more power, more potential to co-create the story in which I live than anyone who ever lived in history before.
I want people to know that. Feel empowered by that. And use that power to write a world really worth living in.
Thanks for your attention, as always. If this landed, subscribe or share.
- Baratunde
Thanks to Layne Deyling Cherland, Alie Kilts, and the entire Life With Machines team for editorial and production support.
