The 3 Topics I'd Like To Work On Next

I’m wrapping up my full time work at Enda - where I was trying to change the way the world sees Africa, all while creating jobs and reducing poverty in Kenya.

In the past, I’ve campaigned for candidates I believe in, empowered everyone to run successful campaigns for change, and advocated for international development.

All of those remain important causes, and I could happy return to working on any of them. But as I look at the world today, and the changes I would like to see tomorrow, there are three issue areas that stick out to me as the most interesting for me to work on right now:

1. Cultural of Climate Change: Making the cultural changes needed to adjust our lives and create space for effective public policy in order to reduce the impact of climate change as much as possible.
2. Men In The American Future: Helping men find a sense of identity and community in a vision of a fair, just, and equitable pluralist America.
3. The Information War: Overcoming disinformation to build a shared reality, and challenging the incentive structures around information which are currently barriers to people accessing objective truth.

I’ll share some detailed thoughts on all three areas.

I’m not going to say anything here that’s new to people who are working day-in-day-out on these issues. But I want to lay out my thinking as a statement of interest and to hopefully spark some conversations and find the right people to work with. If you work on any of these issues, or know someone clever who does, I would love to connect!

Cultural of Climate Change

Obviously Climate Change is a huge issue. Maybe the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced as a species. De-carbonizing our economies and adjusting to the impact of the changing climate requires the greatest mass mobilization of ingenuity, collaboration, and sacrifices we’ve ever seen.

Specifically I’m most interested in the cultural changes that need to happen around climate change. When I say culture, I largely refer to the acceptance that climate change is a reality and we must adjust, as well as proactively living a lifestyle aligned with climate friendly practices.

This is not to say that cultural change is enough to counter climate change, there are some huge public policy changes and international agreements that need to happen for us to save lives and preserve humanity’s well being. But I think making those political changes will be dramatically easier where this is a much broader and deeper cultural consensus around making those political changes.

There are a couple of ways I look at making those cultural changes. The first, is going straight at the problem and challenging people to face reality. Good examples of this are Don’t Look Up or Our Planet.

I don’t feel we have internalized what climate change means or the adjustments we need to make as a society. The problem hasn’t been calculated into the system of the world yet.

For example, here is a lovely house for sale in Miami. It costs 6.5 million dollars.

You could get a 30 year mortgage on this house. Just one problem: in 30 years, it will be underwater. With the 1 foot of projected sea level rise by 2050, NOAA shows high tide inundating this property.

The more expensive houses in the neighborhood do only slightly better. Perhaps why they're worth more?

We have to come to grips with this.

The changes we need to make will be massive. And seeing the way that people respond to relatively minor inconveniences like wearing masks, I worry that convincing the public to embrace these huge changes is a Herculean task. People don’t want to face the music, but the longer we ignore it, the worse it will and the more lives and property will be lost as our Earth changes.

I would love to work with an organization working on this problem and helping the public and politicians come to grips with the scale and gravity of changes that are already in progress.

The second way I think about cultural change for climate change is consumer behavior.

I know we won’t stop climate change by all of us working to reduce our own carbon footprints or buying less stuff. However, there are some behavior changes that will be necessary for us to blunt the impact of climate change, and I strongly believe consumer behavior can help lead to valuable policy change.

For example, there was an explosion of bike purchases and use early in the pandemic, which made it easy for politicians to build more bike lanes. Which of course makes biking more attractive. A great re-enforcing cycle. Pun intended.

There are some consumer changes that are obvious and relatively easy. Emphasis on “relatively”. For example: we need to stop selling cars and trucks that burn petroleum. There are great EV options on the market, and while that switch over is making slower progress than we need, it is happening. Most people, when they drive an EV, will experience it as an improvement on internal combustion engines. As more charging infrastructure comes into place, and car prices come down with scale, it feels like this will continue to accelerate.

Then there are things that are obvious, but hard. For example, the evidence for reducing meat consumption, especial beef, lamb, and pork, is clear. This would make an immediate improvement in human health and be a positive change for the climate. However, unlike EVs, even the best meat substitutes still feel like a downgrade for many people. This is asking people to give up something on a massive scale, and it really really hard. If not impossible. But we have to try.

I’d love to be part of an organization working on one of these consumer challenges around climate.

Men In The American Future

There is a whole ecosystem of nationalist/nativist politics active in the US. Fox News is the most obvious part of this system, but talk radio, a whole network of websites, and eventually a handful of extremist organizations play a roll too. And of course, the way Facebook and YouTube's algorithms serve up sensationalist and increasingly fringe content helps people feel they are not alone as they become increasingly detached from reality.

This ecosystem explicitly targets white men, but men more broadly are brought in by the messaging. At the pointy edge of the problem are armed terrorist groups who have committed sedition in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.

It’s not enough to relegate this people to political irrelevancy by mobilizing more voters and winning elections. Even by doing that, the best case scenario are armed terrorist groups who are willing to commit violence to stop the democratic process.

We have to contest this space. If we believe in a pluralistic America governed by values of fairness, justice, and equality, we have to work on recruiting these men into the world of building a more pluralistic and diverse America. An American that pays recompense for its original and ongoing sins in an effort to truly be the shinning city on a hill that inspires the world as a beacon of freedom, equality, justice, and democracy.

I would love to be doing some work that helps men, who might otherwise find community in organizations who preach hate, to find friends and a sense of purpose in a community helping build an America that is for everyone.

I feel like this images like these are a Rorschach test of American politics right now:

In one camp there are people who see a seditious mob. A mix of militants and fools trying to over throw the democratic process. In the other camp, there are people who see patriots.

I’m willing to concede that anyone in that later camp will be too difficult to convince. However, in the former camp, are 10% of Republicans and a sizeable chunk of independents. We need to work on engaging these folks and help them see an a vision of America in which we all belong.

I understand why white men are typically not targeted by organizers seeking to build a pluralistic America. White men are privileged, and overwhelmingly hold political and social power. Organizing a group implies giving that group more power, so by organizing white men, there is potential to exacerbate existing inequities. To further marginalize those who have been historically and presently excluded from political power.

I appreciate this argument. However, if we don't contest this audience, we leave them open to recruitment to nationalist and seditious groups. We've got to put in the effort and help these men find a place for themselves in building a fairer version of America.

The Information War

This the the great contest between truth and fiction. I imagine for most this brings to mind the Russian disinformation campaigns around Brexit and the 2016 election. The continual lying of the 45th president and members of his party. The filter bubbles Facebook and YouTube in particular create for their users, driving people down a rabbit hole of ever more fringe content that is detached from reality. Alternative facts. Et cetera.

But I think another front of this conflict is the financial incentives that exist around information on the web. Companies that place advertorial right next to editorial, and advertisers hope people can’t tell the difference. Affiliate marketing distorts product reviews, and even which products are selected for review. I think these, and more, are also barriers between people and objective truth. They warp the public’s understanding of reality in a way that benefits those who have the most money.

So much of what is wrong in the way we consume information is broken, that really it could be argued that this is the underlying issue that is helping drive fragmentation and radicalization as well as inaction on climate change.

Simply telling people to be smarter media consumers is not going to work. We have to find ways to make the truth more prevalent, digestible, and sharable.