This newsletter covers humanity’s ongoing paradigm change.
It goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people: bentoists, sociotechnical researchers, progress studiers, effective altruists, metamodernists, ~gameB players, crypto-anarchosyndicalists, social justice activists, VCs, doughnut economists, systems thinkers, and more. Share it with a friend!
Hello!
1) This week I’m excited (and proud!) to share a piece that I’ve been working on for 3 months: We Need To Talk: Marriage Counseling with Capitalism Itself.
It’s my most creative piece to date. It involves dialogue, VR, and amazing illustrations (from Audra Jacobi).
The premise is a funny one—Humanity, Capitalism, and Post-Capitalism are in relationship therapy. Humanity knows we’re “growing out” of Capitalism, but also has no idea what Post-Capitalism is. We’re in a tough pickle.
Through their dialogue and VR scenes, we discover the four key pillars of post-capitalism.
Here are some of my favorite images. First, how Humanity can use Bentoism to look inside itself to understand its needs (similar to the emotions from Pixar’s Inside Out):
Second, this woman represents the idea of Coherent Pluralism—that we should wear many lenses but still create coherence among them:
And finally, the illustration below comes at the end. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but I think “break the 4th wall” in a fun and meaningful way. You’ll need to read to find out how :).
Some of the reviews thus far:
This piece is SO good. I hope with all my heart that is the direction we are going towards.
It was the first time I saw very abstract concepts (such as capitalism and humanity) being personified. It was absolutely brilliant how you narrated a complex story in a visual way.
You managed to make a complicated and emotive subject easy to understand, follow and digest. You left plenty to think about, created a cogent argument, and did it with loads of fun! What's not to like :-)
So…yeah. Even if you don’t normally click on links, I recommend clicking on this one. I promise it’s worth your time.
👉 We Need To Talk: Marriage Counseling with Capitalism Itself 👈
(Or if you’re more interested in a video interview, here is David Perell interviewing me about it.)
Finally, thanks to everyone who helped make the piece a reality:
Thanks to Audra Jacobi for the illustrations and my brother John for the design.
Thanks to my peers in the Write of Passage cohort: Oshan Jarow, Packy McCormick, Joseph Wells, Adrienne Tran, Jessy Lin. And a special thanks to Suthen Siva and David Perell for organizing the cohort. (Check out everyone’s essays here!)
Thanks to these friends for their amazing feedback: Anirudh Pai, Adam Segal, Nathan Schneider, Neha Narula, Yancey Strickler, Yaya Zhang, Jessica Watson-Miller, and Jim Rutt.
2) Folks seemed to like my article last week, Reflecting On Grief: The Death of My Mom, George Floyd, and COVID.
Or at least, it made a lot of folks cry :). Lots of amazing feedback and pointers from folks. Here’s a couple:
You articulated the things it’s taken me 20+ years of grief to figure out.
It’s not just hurt people hurt people. Hurt people hurt themselves. While some hurt is thrown out into the world, a lot of hurt is thrown back at ourselves many more times than the original hurt, internalized as shame, disempowerment, guilt, and self-hatred.
During this time especially, I feel myself wavering due to the depth of grief I feel. However, because I've been battling this for sometime, I go back to my toolkit—that life raft that I hold onto when I see a crest approaching.
I think of these significant life experiences as expanding the bounds of our life experience—and more importantly—feeling them, acknowledging them.
This article was all the things I've seen that you are: loving , heartfelt, well-researched and clear.
My mom would be proud ❤️. Next time you’re experiencing grief, pull up the article. I hope it helps :).
JOBS / OPPORTUNITIES
Joan Donovan is hiring for a Research Fellow in Media Ecosystems at Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School.
Zeynep Tufecki’s lab is hiring two post-docs in social science and computer science.
Progress Studies for Young Scholars accepting applications for high school students (deadline: June 15).
EVENTS
Weekly Bento (recurring, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Sundays).
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
Foresight Institute (recurring)
MUSIC
Just one song this week: Breakfast In Manhattan by Ben Zaidi. I found it because I’m listening to songs on climate change. It’s good for our current moment too. I find it sad. Lyrics:
I don't check my phone in the morning
I don't need to know what's going on
Up in the sky another hurricane is forming, and soon enough we'll all be gone
So I don't check my phone in the morning
I know everything its gonna say
Another wildfire out in California, while they write songs about the rain
And everyday it's repeating I'm getting too numb to feel it. Am I old before my time?
Thanks as always for reading. Please share this newsletter if you like it or reply if you have feedback!
Hope you have a good week. Warmth, Rhys