Nobody Knows What Happens Next
I got on a plane to California hoping somebody could give me a sense of what the next ten years might look like.
I got to go out west at the end of July for a conference hosted by the Cluny Institute, and what I wanted out of it was fairly specific. Partly I just wanted a pulse check on where this conversation actually is right now. It was a strange room for that: about 250 people from the frontier labs, the universities, and the church, together for three days on one question, what a good life looks like in an age of artificial intelligence. But the bigger question underneath that one was what all of this means for society and for community. I've been to a number of events with tech leaders this year, and that has been the question on my mind every time, and I have yet to get a satisfactory answer to it. I figured the people building these tools might have a better vision of it than the rest of us do.
What I found instead is that nobody knows where this is going. Not even the people building it.
I sat at tables with red teamers from the frontier labs, the people paid to break these systems before they ship, with people at the forefront of education policy, with think tankers from Washington. I had many versions of the same conversation, and what's stuck with me is that nobody seemed to have any real idea where this goes.
One of the panels I was looking forward to the most was about community and how people are gathering right now. Toby Shorin was on it. He runs a research company and has spent years studying how new social forms actually come together, and a line of his from that panel discussion has stuck with me: "Everything interesting right now is a prototype."
For a lot of my life I've generally believed in, and been downstream from, people who have plans. When a disaster strikes, somebody has a plan for it. There's a set way to manage this process or that one. Maybe more than at any point in my life, it feels like we're at an inflection point where this could go a few different directions, with a lot of open questions and nobody holding the plan.
So how should we respond? I can think of a few ways.
The first is despair. If the people with the most information can't see the road, what are the rest of us supposed to do?
The second is cynicism. That's the belief that somebody really does know what's going on, and that it's being done to us on purpose. I understand the appeal, but I choose to believe we have more agency than that.
What I want to propose to you is a third thing. I think we're actually in a blank canvas moment.
I keep going back to an essay by Alan Jacobs called "From Tech Critique to Ways of Living." Jacobs points out that we've had the critique of technology for a very long time. Neil Postman and a whole generation around him sharpened it decades ago into what Jacobs calls the Standard Critique of Technology, and Jacobs thinks it's basically right. What's been missing was never the analysis. It's a way of living. His harder point is that the critique was right and lost anyway. Decades of correct analysis did not slow any of this down, which is a good reason to think more analysis isn't the lever.
And whatever the answer turns out to be, it will not be one answer, handed down. In his phrase, it can be generally described but only locally instantiated. It shows up in particular places, among particular people, or it doesn't show up at all.
Which is about when it occurred to me that the silence in those rooms wasn't a failure. There was no answer for anybody to hand me, because that isn't the kind of answer it is.
That's a strange kind of good news, and I think it's the news Taylors needs to hear. It also means the thing I flew out there for was never going to be on the plane home with me.
Because despair and cynicism both do the same thing in the end. They hand off our ability to make choices, and they hand it off at a scale that isn't the only scale. The big questions are real, and there are people in this state doing serious work on them. But it isn't the scale most of our lives happen at. What I'm much more interested in is how we get better at knowing the names of our nearest neighbors, and how we hold each other together through all of this. Nobody in a conference room on the other side of the country is going to answer that one for us. I went and checked.
Back in May I wrote about three verbs available to us. We can join the institutions that already exist, start the ones that don't, and restore the ones that have crumbled. That hasn't changed.
What has changed is where I'd put the emphasis. Getting people together, coordinating a meeting, raising money, all of it is easier to do now than it has ever been. The hard part isn't the tools. It's our attention, and trust, and somebody deciding to go first.
Let me be concrete. Last year Taylors TownSquare ran the Taylors Fellowship. Monthly sessions from August through April, a full reading list. Eight people signed up and five finished it. I think it's one of the most important things we've ever done. We opened applications for a second year, and nobody signed up.
Things like that leave me at a bit of a loss, if I'm being transparent with you. I would love for somebody to hand me a roadmap of what to do next. Which is maybe why Shorin's line has stayed with me. Year one of the Fellowship was a prototype. The information year two gave me was just a much different shape than I expected.
What I still think is worth solving is creating space for people to work through things and grow together. Getting information is easier than at any point in human history. What I want Taylors TownSquare to build is somewhere people do more than receive it, where they're wrestling with ideas alongside each other. Where people can disagree without it costing them the relationship, and without pretending the disagreements aren't there. Where they learn something together and then go build something in this community. That's the gap I see, and I don't know exactly how to solve it yet. I'm not sure I ever entirely will.
We're going to keep working on it, and I'd love your input as we figure out what it looks like. I know how it sounds to tell you nobody signed up and then turn around and ask you to sign up for something.
So, two things. You can reply to this email with either one, or both.
What is one thing Taylors doesn't have that it should? Not the big ones. The small, specific ones, the kind with an address. A bakery. A coffee shop you could sit in for two hours. One of those empty buildings on Main Street. Just name it. You don't need a plan for it.
The Fellowship asked for eight months and a reading list. If that was more than you had, what would the right size have been?
