We have a website, and two new talks
It begins.
Imagine a society where everyone gets support to live their most meaningful life. One person gets unbridled creativity; another, service and love; a third confronts the world’s greatest challenges.
We believe this is within reach, if we aim for it. And that attempting it will reverse the modern trends towards resignation, cynicism, isolation, and polarization. But it means changing the structure of markets, tech, organizations, and more. Over eight years, we’ve developed the necessary tools. Now, it's time to build.
That’s what it says on our new website. We’re also releasing Ellie’s talk, about the movement we want to foster: to “rebuild society on meaning”. Ellie’s talk has an awesome trailer:
Here’s the full talk.
If you want to go deeper, I’m also releasing a talk, that’s 3x as long, also available as an illustrated transcript.
My talk consists of four “chapters”:
In the first, I say why market incentives often destroy what matters most; but my framing gives designers, founders, and ML people something they can do it about it.
In the second chapter, I define of “meaningful living” precisely enough to create surveys, metrics, aligned ML models, etc—so we can monitor whether systems are destructive of people’s meaningful living, and/or design systems to support it.
The third chapter gives a concrete design “toolkit”, developed over 6 years with hundreds of designers, to make things “meaningful on purpose” and to keep them that way. It’s been used to design everything from local events, up to social apps with millions of active users.
Finally, the fourth chapter covers problems with meaning and the social fabric that emerge at large scales—such as with global social networks, operating systems, app stores, and markets. And, again, gives solutions.
I hope this is a chance to spawn subfields, and gather our crew. (To that end, I'd love help sharing it—I made a sharing guide with quote tweet ideas, a schedule of twitter threads, etc. See especially the list of demographics to share with. And there's a bunch of launch week activities.)
Let us know what you think. Or come visit us at The Stoa next Tuesday (thestoa.ca). Or on our discord.
—Joe