O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
— Thomas Wolfe “Look Homeward, Angel”

I’m not the classmate who gets a lump in his throat reliving high school days.

We got off to a bad start together. I vividly remember the lesson. In English class we were assigned to write a short story about ourselves, an assignment intended to reveal capabilities and backgrounds to the teacher. I had a yet-undiscovered knack for writing, so I welcomed the assignment. I was crushed when it was returned with an “F.”

The teacher berated me when I mustered the courage to confront him about the grade. “No one in this class can put together a simple sentence, yet you turn this in,” the bad teacher scowled. “I know you copied it from somewhere. Just don’t try to convince me that you’re smart because I’m not that stupid.”

He was that stupid, defending his incompetence to my mother. She harassed the school’s clueless principal into transferring me to a class with a better teacher. My next English assignment was better appreciated: analyzing the opening passage of my favorite book, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

In a few weeks, I head back to Youngstown, Ohio, for my high school reunion. It’s been 50 years since I graduated from a school that, but for the persistence of memory, no longer exists. Neither irony nor nostalgia leads me back. What leads me back is redemption.

As a journalist and writer, I live a life of words and ideas. I use them to delve into the strange and bitter magic of life. While the English paper episode left me bewildered and demoralized at the time, it became an unintended lesson about fairness and assumptions, persistence and passions that burn still in my psyche. Now I look homeward again, like the protagonist in Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, trying to understand a young man’s burning desire to leave his small town in search of something more.

Recent conversations with former classmates about our reunion restore my personal connection to the past. In my mind, I see my classmates as they were: young and vibrant, full of innocence and confidences. I know this is a fantasy. I intentionally avoid their Facebook pages. I’d rather not judge lives by posts and pictures of current reality.

Similarly, I am strangely relieved that the quirky school building where I attended high school has been torn down. My history is better served by selective memory and literary imagination than a sad and obsolete building.

My classmates have changed. So have I. As a high school student, I was naive and foolish. In a life as a journalist and writer I have become more informed and more certain. Now I am curious how life has shaped classmates who briefly passed through my life during four formative years a long time ago. Fifty years may have passed in linear time, but the past, present and future unfold as one in the time I keep. I like to think that after changes upon changes, we are all more or less the same.

I would also prefer to remember halcyon days, but high school wasn’t idyllically happy. Rather, it was a turbulent period of angst, awkwardness and confusion. I came of age amid discrimination and disillusionment, inexplicable violence, corruption, the Vietnam war and the inevitable decline of almost everything in my hometown.

Teachers failed to inspire or to provide hope. Rather, they abandoned students in the nation’s first teachers’ strike. Inspiration tended to come from hormones: it was a crush on a smart and cute classmate, the editor of the school newspaper, that lead me to “publications class,” not a teacher who recognized my potential as a journalist.

It has taken fifty years to understand the paradox that we each have a limited existence in the limitless framework of time. Many classmates won’t make the reunion. I expect their names will be recalled, as customary at reunions. Others will choose not to make the journey home to a place such as Youngstown. This, I understand as well. Like them, high school for me was neither the best time nor the most rewarding. Family years, college days and current times are far more cherished. Yet I am strangely compelled to return for my high school reunion.

You can’t go home again, Wolfe warns. But I will go back to high school, if just for the weekend, stopping at the site where my old high school once stood. I’ll recall old classmates and shared experiences as I cue up the music from my youth on my iPhone, singing along silently to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends Theme:”

Time it was
And what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences.

Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you.

We Media co-founder Dale Peskin currently serves as Executive Editor of the Loudoun Times-Mirror in Northern Virginia. He is completing his first novel, The Timekeeper’s Daughter, about his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Actor Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises, 2012, The Revenant, 2015) stars in Taboo, a gripping, dark, fictional, literally gut-wrenching period drama on BBC1 television in the UK and the FX Network in the U.S.

Its underexposed grimy cyan hues, story and set location has many viewers, including me, hooked. But there’s something else, a backstory sub-plot portraying a people with mystic rituals. I know them well and they’re a treasure trove of stories.

Taboo’s plot sees Hardy’s character, James Keziah Delaney, back from the dead in Africa to reclaim his late father’s wealth and property. But his father’s nemesis — and there appear to be many in cholera-infested London, including the powerful East India (Tea) Company — want rid of him. They’re also after the deeds he owns to a strategic piece of land, Nookta — a trade route off Canada and America. Delaney is not selling. Conspiracy and gutting murders abound in this 1814 drama.

Presented as a working class flaneur, Delaney incurs frequent flashbacks witnessing and wrestling with a juju witch doctor and rants incantations often in a trance-like state. The show’s thick white fog, blood and savagery scenes conjure up passages from Joseph Conrad’s hellish Heart of Darkness.

From a number of personal observations the show’s creators — Hardy, his father Chips and Steven Knight — found their African source material from a real country, Ghana, or the Gold Coast as it would have been known back then to British merchants. There’s the unfamiliar language, which has fans asking if it‘s real. It is. Twi (pronounced tree) is spoken by the Ashanti people (Asantes), one of Ghana’s dominant cultural groups.

The show’s end credits provide evidence of Hardy’s tutors, The Cultural Group.

Then there’s the appearance of bird markings, carved too, on Delaney’s back. Tribal markings are not uncommon amongst many African tribes, though parts of Delaney’s decorated skin looks more Amazonian Indian, than Ashanti — poetic license, after all it is a fictional drama. The bird, Sankofa, literally translates as ‘go and fetch’. It symbolizes, similar to Chinese culture, the importance of the past’s influence on the present.

As a a twi speaker, I’ve found myself enjoying trying to translate Delaney’s monologues, as well as the film’s symbolisms. I lived in Ghana for eight years and my father, an Ashanti, was steeped in its customs.

As a journalist and filmmaker, there are other reasons I’m drawn to the series. At a time of emerging nationalism and a populist dissociation with multi-culture, Taboo opens a window of sorts for filmmakers, commissioners and audience’s to absorb themselves in the richness of ethnicity; diversity in a period drama.

Remember the sheer excoriating wonder from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006), Passion of Christ (2004) and presently Scorcese’s Silence (2016). I often wonder why no one has tapped into the Ashanti’s story.

Taboo‘s portrayal of Africa may to some be recidivist, yet there’s an opportunity to clasp here. In an era of 360 narratives and back story fills, I’m curious to see how far it will go into Ashanti lore. Otherwise, and not withstanding the show’s own narrative, here’s a chance to uncover a wealth of anthropological and ethnographic stories of a formidable people who in Taboo‘s fictional years really governed a hierarchical dynasty, with customs that mixed religion and mysticism.

Yaa Asentewaa
If you were in awe of Chief Buthelezi’s fighters in Michael Caine’s Zulu (1964) then a film about the Ashanti’s succession of wars with the British will resonate large, particularly given the role of one fighter — their queen mother, leader and uber feminist of the 1900s, Nana Yaa Asantewaa. Eventually captured in the late 1900s, she was exiled for 21 years by the Brits to the Seychelles where she died.

The contemporary images below are from my hard drive but they provide a thread to imagine the world Taboo is acting out.

In the first photo, a King sits, surrounded by his courtiers and royal household. Gold, symbolizing wealth, drapes his arms and neck. Look carefully in the center photo of Blair, then Britain’s PM, shaking the hands of another Ashanti nobility and you’ll notice an aide supporting the chief’s hand. It’s protocol, as well as deference. The chief must not be made to performs tasks by himself.

In historical texts, greetings between Ashanti fighters and others usually occurred using the left hand which was normally reserved for holding a shield. The right hand carried the sword. In the far right picture, a moment of respite; I’m watching on with my brother in customary funereal attire. My father has passed away and his body lay in an open casket at the beginning of an elaborate three-day custom to honor his passing. Christianity and the spirit world, libations n’ all, collide.

My interests in storytelling took hold when I was ten and sent to Ghana from England to attend boarding school. This sojourn was a trend amongst Ghanaian parents resulting in several students earning the monocle, ‘Been tos’, as in ‘Been to… England, the US or USSR, etc. The school, Prempeh College, was one of the Ashanti region’s jewels. Created in 1949 by Sir Osei Tutu Agyeman Prempeh and a Scottish Eton missionary, Reverend Sydney Pearson, the photo below shows a rare informal friendship between the king and Reverend.

In an interview, Pearson tells us how the two would be wrapped up in thought, sometimes playing with model cars. The middle photo taken in 1977 is Aggrey House — one of eight houses at Prempeh College. I’m in there somewhere.

To the far right, Reverend Pearson in his eighties. We (a school colleague Michael Donkor and I) tracked him down to Carnoustie, in Scotland, where he would recount a set of amazing stories which had us weeping. We cut a short promo, narrated by Jon Snow to tell his story.

If you look carefully at the far right photo (below), I’m holding a Kodak camera. Aged thirteen at Prempeh College, I became a documentary photographer. The photo on the left is my father and center photo my mother, a National Health Service nurse.

There’s another story here. Ghanaian’s trying to find their feet in London after their country’s independence and the litany of children who would find themselves in the care of foster and adoptive parents.

Taboo and mystic storytelling
Today, I teach cinema journalism, factual filmmaking including news that uses cinema tropes and cues, at the University of Westminster and in rounding off this personal post there’s one last take away from Taboo. Whilst all film, as a theory, can be translated to Freud’s dreamwork (see Unravelling French Cinema by T. Jefferson Kline), Taboo through its spiritism emphatically doffs its top hat to the dynamic conflict theorized in Freud’s ideas of the subconscious (id) and conscious (superego).

Films structured around classic American film narrative rarely possess the courage to become elastic enough to test audiences with their abstraction in the what happens next? — yet at the same time deliver an immersive story. Taboo appears to be doing that, but in a way, whether that’s coincidence or not, mirroring theories behind African storytelling weighted to themes and relational plot devices. Steve Seager’s theory behind innovative models for digital story design gives an idea of this.

Not only does this allow for discursive techniques — e.g. non-linearity — which keeps the audience guessing, but it means the narrative is open enough for others to retell their stories to fill in the gaps.

African storytelling favors mysticism (see Kwah Ansah’s Love Brewed in the African Pot, 1981) and multiple view points. Film forms can be palimpsestic, so can they occupy several filmic structures, hence whilst I’m absolutely not saying Taboo is akin to Ghanian (African) filmmaking, I am alert to its plot line that mirrors Ghanaian folklore story forms. Now that’s something to mine.

In Singapore a green bird sat in the gutter, still as humidity.
One wing had taken flight, leaving the other alone and wanting.
Birds calling down above me, but this one
Had sung it’s last song.

In Singapore I am upside down
And whirl in circles like double samaras,
Thankful for the lost cool wind that finds me.

Now i am in the gutter looking up, like Wilde,
Absorbing the stars as they call to us,
Me and the broken green bird.

Come to us and shine a light for someone you love
They say.
There’s no need for wings anymore,
In Singapore.

Photo by Rick Robinson. Used with permission.

I love social apps and the ideas and ideals that they attempt to fulfill: sharing, connectedness, empowerment. I love that they are accessible to so many people, worldwide – and that when governments try to restrict their use, we call that repression. Social media, and really all the underlying technology of the mobile, social web, have become entwined in our understanding and aspirations for freedom.

The civic and business impact of Facebook in particular is stunning, along with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, all the message apps, Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Slack, and so many other layers of marketing and enterprise services built to feed, tame and exploit them.

But I hate them, too. They’re the new info overlords, especially Facebook, which filters, censors and is now attempting to discern true, false and unverified news stories in a hopeless effort to maintain the fantasy that our social apps are our friends, friendly places, safe spaces.

They aren’t. They are the machines and algorithms that track us, tag us, target us for advertisers, marketers, hackers, identity thieves, military psychological operations, disinformationists and propagandists. They are the apps that keep us connected to each other, to our families, lovers and never-lost school mates; and that drown us in news, memes, links, ads, surveillance, manipulation and everything said by everyone, everywhere. They bring us joy, laughter and warmth; and violence, rage, shame, crimes against humanity. They are amazing, essential, addictive, and their promise of freedom feels strangely like enslavement.

It is hard to imagine how a complicated relationship like that can be a foundation for trust.

But trust is exactly what so many of us crave – and what news publishers hope they can figure out and restore through technical and human means – and with Facebook’s help.

Big publishers that want to remain big really have no choice. Like it or not, Facebook is now the world’s most influential news gateway and knowledge gatekeeper. Google remains essential for people who search for information, the second most important referrer of traffic to publishers, and a vital player in vetting and suppressing false and “fake” information designed to mislead people. But Facebook is the king, the referral engine that drives the most traffic to most major news publishers – so, by inference, it’s the most important means of discovering news (and everything else we encounter in the Facebook news feed) for the 1.3 billion people who use Facebook each day. Civic discourse, journalism, advertising, marketing and democracy are all dependent on Facebook and will be until some new player, policy or consortium figures out how to dethrone it from that powerful role. That’s an unprecedented scope of economic and civic power – and nearly global except where it has been banned, as in Iran, North Korea and, most notably, China.

This also makes Facebook the world’s most powerful censor.

Traffic referrals by source tracked by Parse.ly, May 11, 2017. The data is based on publishers that use Parse.ly. While not global, it’s a useful proxy for understanding how different apps drive audiences to news and all other web sites.

Credibility is related to trust, but not synonymous. It’s a function of reputation that requires both trust and faith in the integrity and motives of an institution or individual. The root of credibility is credo – to believe.

Although logic and reason are the basis of what we now call the scientific method, many ideas about right and wrong, about how to be good, and even about what exists and how the universe works, come down to faith – to trust in ideas that can not be measured or proven by math or reason. You can not prove, without faith in something immeasurable like reason or common sense, that you are not dreaming, or that we are not avatars in The Matrix.

Professionals, in general, care about both trust and credibility. Doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, police officers, nurses and teachers all agree to rules, best practices and conventions not only because it produces better outcomes, or because it’s the right thing to do, but because aspiring toward those things produces trust — and faith in their work, judgment and words.

Journalists care about both trust and credibility, so a president who routinely mocks The Lying Press and the rise of fake news spread across social networks has naturally spawned a surge of soul-searching and process re-thinking among journalists who desperately want to be viewed as truth-tellers.

But I’ve also come to understand that trust in journalism is part of a much bigger set of relationships between how we know what we know, how we’re governed, how our rules and laws work, how our economy works, how we communicate with each other, how we learn and how we do business and interact with each other every day.

We’re in the midst of a trust crisis, personified by the rise of Trump, who has called journalists “the enemy of the American people“, along with a posse of radical opportunists who prop him up. But the crisis started long before he took power, and it runs much deeper.

Truth, trust and reason, the foundations of justice and freedom, are under attack. So are scientists, immigrants, women, minorities, the internet, the environment, the media, international peace, public schools, teachers, children, children who need to use bathrooms in theirs schools, artists, writers, scholars, free speech, personal privacy, net neutrality, people who work for the government, and human dignity itself.

Professional journalists, our first line of truth-tellers, have been demonized by leaders who are supposed to serve and unite the public, not confuse and divide it. The mobile, social web, which was supposed to enlighten and set us free, has set us against each other. The civic rules that most of us want to trust without thinking about them, the foundation of trust in our system of government that’s supposed to keep nut jobs out of the White House, has broken down. Our politics has become a frenzy of crazy talk, conspiracy theories, disinformation, deception and distraction, a symptom of a trust crisis that has, among other things, turned us against each other. Lines have been drawn. We are united in our distrust of the other.

Our civic discourse is troubled, our politics divisive, angry and confused. This is a global problem, not just an American headache. Two thirds of the countries surveyed annually by the public relations firm Edelman are now considered “distrusters,” meaning less than half of the people in those countries trust in the institutions of business, government, media and nongovernmental organizations “to do what is right.”

It’s beyond naive to blame everything bad about this great unravelling on Facebook. Bad actors are responsible – bad people intentionally doing bad things for bad purposes.

But it’s not irrational to acknowledge that our technology, the web, our digital connectedness and Facebook in particular has enabled this chaos.

Do we trust that our technology is designed to do what is right?

As software eats the world, our expectations and anxieties about privacy, big data, hackers, corporate and government surveillance of everything and everyone become central to culture and to all those relationships that depend upon trust. They are part of a deeper, more pervasive cultural underlay of trust, or distrust, in everyday experiences we’d like to take for granted, but can’t. The software in our smartphones, laptops, traffic cameras, VR headsets, Facebook apps, Amazon Echos, Snap glasses, TVs, chatbots and everything else is created with rules, values and intent – and these may be benign, benevolent or immoral. They are dependent on the humans who design and control them.

This is obvious, and yet it’s also hidden, by design, because the best technology is invisible. It just works.

It turns out, the same is true of the worst technology.

“Coding is a superpower,” Quincy Larson writes at FreeCode Camp. “With it, you can bend reality to your will. You can make the world a better place. Or you can destroy it. You may be able to fool the regulators, the police, the judges. You may be able to fool the general public. And you may be able to go on doing this indefinitely without being caught. But that doesn’t make it right.”

Larson illustrates his point with three companies that have, without doubt, deployed software for dark purposes:

• Uber, which used sophisticated and deeply mischievous software to evade law enforcement investigators in cities where its ride-sharing service was illegal.

• Volkswagon, which used software to hide the pollution coming out of the tailpipes of its diesel engines.

• Zenefits, which used software to help its insurance agents skip hours of required training.

People who crave power use confusion and distrust to their advantage while the rest of us struggle to resist and endure until the balance of trust can tilt back toward common sense, compassion and good will.

As we try to get out from Trump and back on track toward some semblance of reason and sanity, we shouldn’t lose site of what needs fixing. Getting rid of Trump will help, but won’t fix the underlying problems.

Our systems for public discourse, education and rule-making haven’t kept up with a culture overwhelmed and disrupted by technology and stressed by war, climate change, corruption and economic inequality. These are the challenges our leaders should be confronting, and we’re going to have to seek and champion those who will confront them and work for us, not against us, to restore faith and trust in everything, including our tech, our truth-tellers and our governments, elections, economies and businesses. These are exceptional challenges, and we shouldn’t let the urgency of stopping Trump distract us from them. We’ll be working on how to restore trust in everything long after he is out of the White House.

Brian Reich is an author, speaker, speech writer, consultant and political strategist. His newest book is The Imagination Gap. He’s @BrianReich on Twitter and there’s more about him at littlemmedia – Andrew

Q. Introduce yourself. Tell me about your interests, what you do, and something personal about your life (like where you live, family … something that isn’t in your generic bio or on LinkedIn)

A. My name is Brian Reich; I’m a speechwriter, author, media junkie and sports nut. I work with media companies, startups, nonprofits, political, and advocacy organizations and other groups – a big focus of mine has been the impact of media and technology on society. One of my recent projects was profiled in Fast Company.

I am also the author of three books. My most recent, The Imagination Gap, takes on the idea of innovation fatigue, and outlines how to get people to use their imagination more.

As for something that you won’t find bouncing around my regular bio … twenty years ago, when I was only 19 years old, I set out to visit every major league baseball stadium — a trip I subsequently named “The Great American Baseball Trip.” My trip lasted some 64 days and covered more than 18,000 miles. In addition to attending a game in each of the 30 major league cities, I visited the Hall of Fame, attended the All-Star Game, and was invited to throw out the first pitch at a Barons game in Birmingham (btw… the umpire will confirm that I threw a perfect strike).

Along the way, I captured the stories and pictures of people who I encountered during my adventure and published them online (a blog before blogging existed, really). I wrote a weekly newspaper column and served as a correspondent for the Sports Fan Radio Network during the trip as well. Today, one of the things I write and speak about is sports – through the lens of culture, society, economics, and politics. I’m particularly interested in the fan experience, the ways that casual fans engage with sports, and how sports fandom influences other aspects of our lives. Along the same lines, I believe ballparks and stadiums are staging grounds for some of America’s most unique and powerful experiences (in fact, I wrote a paper in college arguing that baseball ought to be considered a form of religion). So much of my thinking around those issues was inspired by my trip to visit all the ballparks.

Q. Where did you grow up, what was that like?

A. I essentially grew up in two places: Seattle, Washington, and Westport, Connecticut. I moved back and forth between the two places, attended a few different schools. Westport and Seattle could not have been more different. Seattle is a vibrant, diverse, city, whose growth over the past thirty years (or so) was heavily influenced by companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon and other startups. When I was growing up, Seattle was also ground zero for the alternative/grunge music revolution, highlighted by the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam (the bassist for Pearl Jam attended my high school – a few years before I was there). By contrast, Westport is a sleepy bedroom community – essentially as a suburb of New York City. It’s beautiful and quiet, and it hasn’t changed all that much over time.

The one overlap between Westport and Seattle for me was politics. I worked on political campaigns in both Seattle and Westport, and more generally across Washington and Connecticut. That’s actually true for every place I have ever lived (Ann Arbor, Michigan, Washington, DC, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and more). Working in/around politics gives you the opportunity to engage with people who you might not otherwise encounter in your daily life and learn about issues that don’t necessarily affect you directly. Even if I didn’t fully appreciate it while it was happening, I know I benefited from growing up in very different environments – and what I learned and experienced has always been a part of my thinking.

Q. How did you get from there to what you’re doing now?

A. According to family legend, I unknowingly participated in literature drops and fundraisers in utero. As a small boy, I wore t-shirts and campaign buttons collected on the trail. And if there had been a re-elect Jimmy Carter lunch box, I probably would have carried one. Starting in high school, I began working on political campaigns, earning my first paying campaign job at the age of 14. For the next decade, I worked on dozens of campaigns across the country: student elections at college in Michigan; local initiatives and city council races in Seattle; I was even Campaign Manager for a Congressional campaign in Connecticut, the youngest person in the nation to hold such a position.

Beginning in 1999, I worked as the Vice President’s briefing book director – responsible for pulling together the materials that Al Gore used to prepare for his day. I wore three pagers and two cell phones, carried two Palm Pilots and operated two different laptops each day. I traveled the country with the Vice President – visiting four and five cities and attending literally dozens of events each day. I was nicknamed the “Mouse” (for the character in the Matrix and his technological understanding) and wore a proud smile as the Vice President ridiculed him openly in front of the national media for my quirky work habits and ability to fall asleep in any position, anywhere.

Keep in mind, this was before Google or Facebook or even smartphones were part of our daily lives.  I had to build my own information network. One example: I developed relationships with reference librarians in nearly every time zone around the globe, so even when it was the middle of the night in Washington, DC, I could call someone in Honolulu to get information that would help complete a briefing. Fast forward to today and we are living in a truly connected society – with access to information, to people, to ideas from anywhere on the planet. But I remember how important it is to think in a networked way, to recognize that ideas and expertise exists everywhere, and especially when working with nonprofit organizations who have limited resources, or when trying to solve a complex problem, you have to take advantage of everything at your disposal – not just what is easiest to access or manage.

One other important point about campaign life – Al Gore tells a joke about how in politics you either win or lose — or in some cases, as happened in 2000, there is a special third category.  But for the most part, the metrics of success in politics are very clear. You have to get more votes than the person you are running against on Election Day. If you can’t do that, you lose.  Full stop.  I have spent my career thinking about ways to apply the sophistication of political campaigns to work in other ways.

Q. The world is drowning in creativity, and also unsolved problems. There seems to be an endless stream of crazy, amazing and scary technologies, we’re in the midst of a global shift to renewable energy, there’s an oversupply of stories and storytellers, and still too many books to read. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor grows wider, political extremes are widening, wars in Syria and Iraq won’t end and the stream of refugees is endless. What makes you say there’s an imagination gap?

A. The pace of change is so rapid today that it is easy to become focused on making small, regular improvements and convincing ourselves that they will result in dramatic changes to our lives. But we also are losing sight of the big picture. In times of massive change and constant disruption, it is more important than ever that we look further ahead, and consider the larger opportunities that could be available. We have experienced periods of major disruption before – and just as now, it was the use of imagination during those times that helped us to shape a future that was so dramatically different than what came before.

Every day it seems, there are new apps to download, ideas to ponder, products to buy or trends to embrace. But just how transformative are these creations? All of these exciting improvements to our lives qualify as innovations – necessary and valuable improvements on the way that we had operated in the past – but we aren’t thinking big enough.

Instead of exploring the boundless possibilities of using technology to advance health or re-invent global politics, the limits of our imagination are driving the development of apps that enable a better television viewing experience or on-demand food delivery. In many cases we’re having discussions (and arguments) about the same things we were a generation ago. We’re trying to figure out what might happen in the future, but we seem limited to using the vocabulary and concepts of the past to guide our thinking.

Meanwhile, so many potentially interesting and important ideas are going unexplored or not even being introduced at all, because they are outside of our current experience. We need to be dreaming up things that are beyond what we know or think could be possible. That requires imagination. We simply aren’t using our imagination enough, which sets us up for a pretty disappointing future.

Q. Help me imagine what happens when the imagine gap is reduced. Then what happens?

A. The short answer is … anything is possible when we close the imagination gap. For example:

Imagine if … every eligible person in the United States – 100% – voted on Election Day. Full participation would mean our politics would function very differently.

Imagine if … nobody died of coronary artery failure, Malaria, cancer (of any kind), addiction, or any other disease. What if diseases no longer even existed?

Imagine if… instead of commuting to work, taking a trip to the ballpark, or running an errand at the store using a car, bus, subway or any other vehicle, you were converted into an energy pattern and then beamed to your target destination and rematerialized. Where would you want to go?

These are not ridiculous ideas. Political leaders, medical experts, and science fiction writers have suggested each of them, in one form or another, in just the past few years. But the prospects of living in a world in which these ideas represent our reality seem improbable, if not impossible.

There are, of course, plenty of once impossible-seeming ideas – a cocktail that can fight certain infections in the body, a supercomputer that fits in your pocket, a computer that can devise the perfect way to use mayonnaise in a recipe, an African American elected President of the United States – that have become a reality.

All of these ideas, and countless others, began with imagination. Our history as a society, and the evolution of the human race, has been driven by imagination. And yet, right now, in every facet of our lives – every industry, every country, and every community – we face this imagination gap. There are new ideas being generated, but not enough of them. There are ambitious ideas about how to design and shape the future, but people are not acting on them.

Few of us are fully prepared for the kind of transformation that is occurring in our society – where everything, from our economy to health to every aspect of the human experience looks and functions differently than ever before. It is all happening so quickly, that within a decade or two everything will have changed. And then it will change again, just as quickly. Nobody, it seems, is focusing on what could be possible beyond what is happening now, let alone what’s next, or could be possible beyond that.

Closing the imagination gap puts us on an entirely different path forward. Imagine what that might look like.

Photos by Ann Sheffer (Brian’s mom). Used with permission.

Today I’m relaunching We Media with a new approach and an invitation for new voices to join me here. I hope you’ll be part of it.

I’m looking for people who like the idea of a quieter place and a slower pace for personal essays, analysis, photo stories and other kinds of long-form stories – even poetry and fiction. There’s no algorithm to guess which posts are best for you. There’s one feed. Everyone sees the same thing. Emails are occasional, not relentless. You don’t have to check in every day, or every hour.

We Media is still a place for my voice, which you’ll hear in my writing, see in my photos and design choices, sense in my collection of stories and ideas from others and I hope welcome in One Thing, my email newsletter. (It’s also still an agency for companies that want help with their stories). But this is also a place for many voices, including yours when you feel inspired to submit a post. This is a place for personal views and perspectives from curious people everywhere. That’s also who We Media is for. That’s who we are. That’s our tribe.

If you’ve followed me, worked with me, heard me speak or attended any of the events or startup investment challenges I’ve curated then you should sense some familiar tones. I’m still obsessed with how we know what we know, and what to do about it. I’m still curious and passionate about journalism, storytelling, freedom, technology, innovation, creativity, business with purpose, global culture, local life, design and the future of everything.

But my obsessions have evolved, too, especially in the cold, dim and mind-numbing light of the Trump election. We Media reflects what I need in my digital mid-life as much as what I think the world needs. It’s for people, like me, who crave signs of humanity, compassion and authentic voices in the digital shoutstorm. It’s an antidote to the emotional chaos and relentless automation of social media, online advertising, pervasive personal data surveillance, propaganda, disinformation, distrust and manipulation. Big media can do its thing. There will always be big media. We need big media and we need to push it to be better at what it does.

But we need something different, too, something smaller, more personal, more intimate and more respectful of our intelligence, our individual voices, our agency and our time.

I need something different. So I’m making it.

This is a new approach, a big deal for me personally, and I hope it’s both meaningful and valuable to you.

Thanks for your continued interest. I hope to hear your voice soon too.

Photo: Toronto Wall, April 2017, by Andrew Nachison. Used with permission.

Time passes, distance grows, things are no longer what they seem. A prose poem.

I spent evenings in the heart of the city
when my own heart was new.
I climbed your towers thinking I could
gaze from your windows and see forever.
I drank the brightest cocktails
atop your glowingest rooftops.
I explored the forbidden excitements
of your darkest places. I awakened
in your torpid gutters at dawn,
basking in low-slung golden sunlight
that left me breathless and energized
as I hurtled into another day.

But when cities cool for us, we decamp.
We set up shop in our soul’s calmer suburbs
and become not doers, but watchers.
Time transforms each of us into our personal John Does —
not outsiders, precisely, but enlightened pretenders,
eyeing from a distance for the first time
the urban intimacies we have cherished for so long.
We are inside and outside,
experiencing and watching all at once:
Lovers and voyeurs, powered by hope and fire,
locked in our profane dance of place-trading.

A city at night is full of sirens.
Now, chastened, I hear them from afar.
Their demanding dramas still slice through me
and I vibrate with the chaos they herald.
But on this day, for once,
I can ignore the unsettling emergencies
that their jagged promise holds.

Like so many of my kind,
I was arrogant about the city.
I thought it was my own,
that it had spent its entire history
waiting only for me
that it came alive only when I finally, inevitably
arrived at its doorstep
and had the temerity to knock.
I believed I was a citizen of the city.
Time, though, took delight in proving me wrong.
I paid required tolls, traversed bridges of hot metal,
pushed through dimly vignetted tunnels
with no visible progress.
And today my admission to you, my metropolis,
is gone with the wind, spirited off by days
that became months, by months that peaceably
assembled into years and blew casual wrinkles
onto my once-callow face.

Now it begins: I wish my city a doleful goodbye
with a tender poem and a forever echoing song.
And I know, natively but no longer naively,
that while the city that loved me pulsates on
I am now a visitor forevermore
watching the luminous skyline from atop a distant hill
and smiling at a fragmented memory
that taunts me with my own fading fever dream
and tries to persuade me
I once belonged.

— Bangkok, Thailand, 4/27/17

Ted Anthony, a Pittsburgher living in Thailand, is the author of Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song. He’s on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Photo illustration by Ted Anthony. Used with permission.

I’m not sure citizen science, pioneered with annual bird counts by members of the Audubon Society, needs a new name. But a new report from global PR firm Weber Shandwick provides a useful and thoughtful narrative of “conscious crowdsourcing” in purpose-driven organizations.

It’s also timely for a sector that is mostly absent from the report: big, traditional media companies. aka Mainstream Media. MSM. They are desperate for trust, at war with governments, leaders and policy advocates who openly mock and discredit them, and yet they remain focused on delivering and broadcasting content and products, rather than on empowering the public or sharing responsibility for the future that we will all share.

It’s long past time for publishers to think about why their relationships with their communities are so one-way – why the people formerly known as the audience are still viewed almost exclusively as the audience – as consumers rather than collaborators. We live in a two-way, networked culture.

Our stories, knowledge, planet and destinies are shared. That’s the whole point of social media, and this is old news, a civic innovation that has taken hold in science, business, politics and cause marketing but, strangely, not in media. It’s time for the news business to catch up, show some humility and embrace the culture that it is a part of, not above.

Photo Credit: By Andrew Nachison. Used with permission. “All are welcome.” Immigration policy protest Sunday, January 29, 2017 at Washington-Dulles International Airport.

Alan Webber is the co-founding editor of Fast Company magazine, former Editorial Director of the Harvard Business Review and the founder of the public interest non-profit, One New Mexico, an organization that seeks to make life better for all New Mexicans.

After the United States lost the Vietnam War, our country’s top military strategists gathered to analyze the defeat and design the remedy. Ultimately they drafted new rules of engagement: We’d lost, they concluded, because we’d fought the wrong war using the wrong rules; the enemy had been fighting — and winning — a completely different kind of military engagement.

I mention that history by way of metaphor to talk about the engagement between Donald Trump and the press. President Trump has been leading the press around by its collective nose for more than a year. He used and abused them during the campaign, running as much against the press as against Hillary Clinton.

Last week the president took his press abuse to whole new levels. He called the news media “the enemy of the American people” — language that’s dangerously close to branding reporters “an enemy of the state.”

Now, in a new assault on the press, the White House banned some of the country’s leading news organizations from an off-camera “gaggle” while including spurious right-wing journalists. Remarkably, only two reporters refused to attend in an act of solidarity with the banned journalists.

So far in responding to these attacks the press has insisted on more of the same: We’re going to keep doing our jobs, they say. The facts are the facts, and reporting the facts is what we do.

The problem is, this time really is different. This time the old rules of engagement simply don’t apply—not when the president puts organizations like Breitbart and Infowars on an equal footing with the real journalists with real standards.

Like the U.S. military after its defeat at the hands of a guerilla-war fighting opponent, the legitimate U.S. press now must re-write its rules of engagement or risk failure. And we can’t afford that. We need the press, more than ever.

Here are six rules to consider.

1. Create your own NATO: News Alliance for Truth and Objectivity. (Yes, there are existing professional associations, but not for this unique time and this urgent purpose.) Hire or appoint an executive director who can speak for this NATO alliance, a respected and trusted retired journalist from an earlier era. Never stop competing against each other for scoops, leaks and sources. But like the other NATO, adopt a basic principle: An attack on one is an attack on all.

2. Stop letting yourselves be abused. You are under no obligation to participate passively in your own public flogging. Plan ahead: The next time President Trump or one of his designated mini-Trumps decides to abuse you personally, publicly and professionally, take a united stand.

3. Don’t lose track of past, unresolved issues. Take a lesson from the clock that ran on the news during the Carter Administration and the Iranian hostage crisis: “America Held Hostage, Day #X.” How many days has it been since President Trump promised to release his income taxes? Legally separate himself from his business interests? Start a clock on President Trump.

4. Set up a NATO war-room for real-time fact checking. Remember: You are the News Alliance for Truth and Objectivity. You are not only in the news business. You are in the truth business—which goes to the heart of these attacks on your credibility. Set up a NATO website with an up-to-the-minute truth dashboard. It’s not enough to tell the American people the truth; you also need to show the truth.

5. Those who argue that you need to do your jobs and report the news are right, of course. And more. In the context of the Trump administration you have a higher calling: You need to insist on the real meaning of words. Your job is to defend our words from being distorted and de-based. There are no such things as “alternative facts”—even with air quotes. Words matter. Don’t start using President Trump’s alternative dictionary.

6. Don’t just report news. Find news, dig for news, go out and listen for news. If ever there was a time for journalists to become investigative reporters, this is it. We need the story behind the story. We need you to ferret out what’s going on in all the places the Trump administration doesn’t want you to look.

No, the press is not at war with the Trump administration. But it’s not good enough for the press simply to do what it has always done the way it has always done it.

The press needs new rules of engagement if it is to do its critical, time-honored job: Tell the truth, give us the information we need, and investigate and hold accountable those in power.

A version of this post originally appeared in Huffington Post and is published here with permission of the author.

Photo Credit: Amador Loureiro / Creative Commons via Unsplash

The Outline is the most honest media launch I’ve seen in a long time. There’s no pretense about the problem it’s solving, the niche it’s filling, the unserved audience it’s serving. It’s not special sauce for millennials.

“Our foundational reason for building The Outline is that we’re really excited about putting something into the world that wasn’t there before,” founder / editor Josh Topolsky wrote in his introduction to the site upon its launch this week.

Yes. Thank you. In other words: Because. That is why people create new things. That is why we have art, and it’s also the excuse for most business. You may want to earn an income from it, or get rich at it, or become famous, or achieve influence, or take on some problem that needs fixing. But there are many ways to pursue those things. You launch something brand new because you want to make something brand new. And maybe, just maybe, it is lovely too.

The Outline is an online news magazine, built with $5 million from investors who see mad and profit-making genius in Topolsky. I see a modern-ish blog with a mix of post types and links to stories elsewhere. Time will tell on the payout. I saw a nice ad from Cadillac. The focus on power, culture and the future is familiar territory for web publishers and a realm that fills my feeds. The trick is to make it feel fresh, which might, just might, bring in enough loyal readers and advertisers to keep it going.

The approach reminds me of a more colorful version of QZ, another thoughtful web magazine aimed at a similar white collar magazine audience. Perhaps the words themselves will feel more special, literate, literary, personal or something compared to those of QZ, Fast Co., The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the … whatever. As I write, I realize that four-year-old QZ, which is also smart on presentation and reporting, blends in with all the rest. I stumble across it from time to time. It’s there, I can’t really say why or that it fills any void in my life, or the world. The Outline is refreshing because it makes no claims to any of that. For now, at least, it is pure style: words and links set against dark colors plus cutesy graphic “stickers” sprinkled in for visual spice. That, plus lots more Cadillac, could make The Outline a nice business, or at least a very nice blog.

Despair may not be a useful answer to Donald Trump, but it’s mine. I’m not ready for can-do optimism or failure-is-not-an-option activism just yet. I’m not ready to make a list of things I’ll do. This is not the day for a cup half full. My cup is dry, ok? The American election this week was an emotional rout. So I’m starting with despair. I’ll get to resistance. I’ll figure out how to fight the man and turn this week’s psychic lemon into lemonade. But first: despair.

Perhaps you are a man or woman of action, a social entrepreneur and civic crisis opportunist who must, simply must, do something at all times. You are a doer. You are a list maker. You get things done. You go forward.

Or you’re already a nonstop activist, or a journalist or a pundit, maybe even a blogger (yo, wassup!), and you can move right along into the new story. There is always a new story.

You are a talking head and you are talking, talking, talking. Or you tweet all day. You’ve got work to do and you’re ready to do it. You are a leader. You have no time for tears, regrets or crippling fear. I saw your pep talk and action plan on Facebook. You posted it to Medium for maximum visibility, didn’t you? Thank you for the fund-raising email(s) this morning. That was quick thinking. Good for you. You are awesome.

I’m not. I’m slower. I need to catch my breath. I need to pull up the covers, shut down my social media, take some time to think this through and hide in a hole for a few more days. I need to hug my family and figure out how to keep them safe.

As I write, it’s the third morning of President-Elect Trump. I can’t believe I’m saying that. I can’t believe anyone is. It doesn’t feel better. I don’t feel better. I feel like my country has lost its mind.

I don’t know why he won other than that’s how America’s weird Electoral College works. I get that poor and poorly educated white men voted for him. Apparently so did many other kinds of people, including enough well-educated men, women, Latinos and Muslim Uber drivers to make a difference in the results. I don’t really get why anyone voted for him. I’ve read and heard about the missed story of alienation in rural and formerly industrial America. I get that storyline, but not the vote. I get anger, disappointment and voting for change, but not for a hateful man so clearly obsessed with himself that we can’t even call him stable. Will he be a benevolent dictator, revert to his libertarian instincts on social issues, lock arms with his neo-Nazi KKK honor guard, defer to the anti-woman zealotry of his Christian-right vice president? Will he mow down national forests to search for coal, or make war with the next nation that mocks the size of his hands? We don’t know. How can anyone vote for a bully who exudes and uses fear and loathing, to say nothing of serial bankruptcy and thuggery, to divide and conquer whoever stands in his way?

Don’t talk to me about empathy. I’m listening, my heart is open. But I don’t feel empathy for voters who could consider tolerable a relentless record of dehumanizing disdain for women, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, foreigners, journalists and the truth.

I feel despair.

I can’t explain why we’re here, or rationalize the “will of the people,” or suggest how to smooth this over, ride it out, be classy, look on the bright side, focus on the battles ahead or wish a bon voyage and smooth sailing to the new gang of deplorables who will shine Trump’s shoes, prop him up and drag the nation down in a cloud of privatized, deregulated smoke. No. Fuck that. Fuck no. I didn’t think this could happen. It did. Now I’m terrified that anything can happen.

I’ve lost faith in the goodness and common sense of my fellow citizens, in the systems that led them to this suicidal and disrespectful choice. So I’m starting with despair and sticking with it until I figure out where to go and how to get there.

What is despair? It’s an emptiness, a void of hopeless, powerless, pointless futility. It’s the bleak, dark depth of depression, the fourth stage of Kübler-Ross grief after denial, anger and bargaining (and before acceptance). I’ve skipped ahead in the process and hope to backtrack to anger, and to channel that into opposition, or creation, or both. For now: despair.

My point, for now, is that this feeling of doom isn’t wrong, even if it’s as pointless as the feeling itself. It’s part of grief, as human as rage, sexuality, music, laughter, ingenuity, language, loss and the story-telling and sense-making we all crave. Don’t tell me I’m stupid or pointless or weak or impractical for what I feel. Don’t tell me how to grieve, or when, or that I need to get over it, get up, get to work and keep up with someone else’s schedule.

This was, after all, a passionate and strangely human election, wasn’t it? It was just strange in the worst of ways: driven by bleak, angry, mean and desperate feelings, but also by stories of family, privilege, sex, corruption, foreign interference, deceit and pervasive distrust. For all his ugliness, and whatever comes of it, Donald Trump tapped into powerful emotions in a way that Hillary Clinton didn’t.

I’m still too numb to think clearly about what went wrong to get us here, but I’m clear enough to know that many things went wrong, not just one. So we can’t fix the one thing that, when fixed, will give us the right result next time. Getting rid of the Electoral College would have changed the results this time, but even that may not help next time. It wouldn’t change the fact that millions of Americans accepted or ignored Trump’s venom and instability. Next time, there could be more of them.

There’s so much to fix: the economy, climate change, race, justice, income inequality, the status of workers, industry and labor unions, healthcare, technology disruptions, the gig economy, journalism, disinformation, cybersecurity, voter suppression, prison reform, discrimination, opiates, the Middle East, values, discernment and critical thinking. The polls were wrong. The analysts who interpreted the polls were wrong. Their commentary was wrong. Everything that led us to here, to this state of disbelief and despair, was completely, utterly wrong. You can even say it like Trump, or Alec Baldwin as Trump: “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.” Who’s laughing now?

America feels broken – really broken, not just tweetable broken. So I feel broken too.

For those of us who believed Hillary would prevail, our trust in what we know is now shattered. We all missed the story, not just the media, or the third-party don’t-give-a-fuck voters, or the “protest” nonvoters. We all missed it.

So yes, there are many things to work on. But denying the emotional depth of this mind-bending civic and cultural failure isn’t one of them. I had faith that the election and my country would turn out alright this week. They didn’t. For me, for now, the only thing to “do” is obvious: despair.

I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair. – Paul Krugman

But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals— that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do. – David Remnick

What the everlasting hell are we supposed to do with this nightmare circus of infinite fuck? – Paul Ford (@ftrain)

Photo: Dark Subway Girl NYC, 2014 by Andrew Nachison. All rights reserved.

The fundamentals of professional photography – oversupply in the digital / gig economy – should be familiar to all journalists. But they’ve been especially brutal on photographers. Everyone doesn’t want to be a journalist. But everyone snaps photos. Danielle Jackson, co-founder of the Bronx Documentary Center, asks some good questions at Creativz, and she ties the living wage struggles of photographers and other artists to those of all gig workers:

What if the field could foster industry-level conversations on creating sustainability? Should photo agencies offer healthcare? … Could foundations who support nonprofit media organizations insist their grantees pay advances? … And can photographers join larger political fights for universal healthcare, inexpensive education, and affordable housing, all of which will support the lives of artists, and others, in numbers much higher than any industry effort alone?

If you’ve got additional ideas, examples or counterpoints, add your voice.

via Creativz

Photo by Kaleb Nimz via Unspalsh / Creative Commons Zero

– Cory Doctorow