Future Here Now: Saviors fail most of the time (or, Privilege Does Not Equal the Right Answers)
Signals
Today’s signals are deep. I’d welcome subscriber discussion in the comments or on the Substack App’s Chat function. If you’re not a subscriber, you can get the full series on this and other topics - and the ability to comment and chat - right here.
Signals
Transformative innovation from the people who know best
https://www.fastcompany.com/90820007/5-bold-ideas-that-could-help-save-the-planet
This is an article from last year, but I don't think it got a whole lot of press, especially in the U.S. And if it did, it might have opened Americans' eyes to the kinds of transformative innovation that people who aren't part of an elite class can create when they get a chance.
Of the five prizes, three of them went to people who were associated with universities, which is great. But I want you to pay particular attention to the prize recipient stories from Kenya and Australia.
Ms. Magayi in Kenya was an orphaned teenage mother in a slum, and it was her own first-hand tragedy to see the transformative potential in overhauling a humble household tool -- one that decades' worth of well-intentioned do-gooders working to address poverty in urban Kenya had somehow never addressed. And imagine the determination you would have to have to not only create this thing, but get yourself through college without parents and with a daughter, on nothing but your own savings and while repeatedly sick from the stove within your own home.
The Indigenous Rangers in Queensland, Australia are stunning in a different way - and a way that leverages the core paradigm of mutual interdependence that underlies many indigenous cultures (and too often meets derision from traditional western-style "leadership"). It's worth noting that the introductory page on the QIWRN website specifies that the organization is co-designed with and centered on Indigenous women, which means that their inherited learnings about the ecosystems they take care of drive their work.
The Culture and the Poisons of Supremacy
https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html
With the Earthshot article fresh in your mind, you may be better equipped to grapple with this. Most of us would rightly recoil from being told that we hold white supremacist ideologies, no matter our skin color or background. But if you grapple honestly with the assertions made here - and the characterization of traits like "either-or thinking," "perfectionism," "objectivity," or "fear of open conflict," and you compare how most of us approach these issues to someone like the Indigenous Rangers, then...
I don't know how you will respond. Considering some of these traits as potentially toxic may make sense to you, while discounting others may feel like sacrilege. Some of these might even make you angry. I certainly pushed back the first (few) times.
But the Fusion Era is already demanding that we learn to think and work together in new ways, ways that Industrial era models could not fathom. I know for me that this is a constant work in progress, but learning to see outside of my Industrial Era paradigm - and to learn that other approaches to my fundamental assumptions might see something important that my paradigm is blind to - that has made most of my own work over the last dozen years possible. And it has opened my life up to people and ideas and ways of doing and being that I would have never had access to otherwise.
I still struggle with a lot of this - intellectually, and in how I live and work. But it's a beneficial struggle. I hope you'll find it beneficial too,
Design Arrogance and the Lesson of America
https://dellarucker.medium.com/design-arrogance-and-the-lesson-of-america-65d01f3ba247
This is one of my favorite pieces that I have written - and it was one of the first to get any level of attention. I share it here to bring all of the abstract and international in the last two Signals back to the reality that most of us live in every day. And this piece illustrates a side of this issue that the others can't:
the potential for our grand designs and good intentions to create a huge, painful mess that others after us get to clean up. If it can be cleaned up. Too often, it can't - especially the parts that did damage to peoples' lives.
I'd particularly encourage you to share this with architects, urban designers, and others who have bought into the "Make No Little Plans" maxim. I watched Gruen's outcomes and Duany's proclamations, and now I'm seeing at least a subset of the next generation do the same thing. Given the volatility and unpredictability that the Fusion Era is giving us, that's an attitude that has to change.