Thank You
Wrapping up 2020 / Pop Up Think Tank / Design & Humanity on the Ventures Podcast
every seemingly innocent fragment of information is secretly plotting how to escape its context and cause trouble
Happy holidays!
First, I wanted to send a quick note of gratitude to all 73 of you.
Thank you. Thank you for joining me here, reading, commenting, and sharing. It means a lot to me.
I began this newsletter in July, not to build an audience (I’ve always been terrible at selling myself), but to create a space for myself to learn and explore. I’ve explored a little (especially this last couple months, as day job obligations have negated the ability to spend much time here), but I have learned a lot.
Some of these learnings have been significant. Exploring the theme of otherness has shed new light on white privilege, false constructs of separation, and how I apply arbitrary virtue to certain aspects of my identity. A cornerstone of this learning has been the work of Charles Eisenstein. I highly suggest you subscribe to his work, read his backlog of essays, and pick up his book The Ascent of Humanity. The exploration of otherness and separation is by no means done, and I’m looking forward to unpacking it further in 2021.
Secondly, these learnings have catalyzed some latent ideas for me. My conviction that we we need to reignite our social imagination about what could be has never been stronger. This conviction, married with my passion for understanding the systems on which human society and human experience are built, and how those systems could possibly evolve in the future, has lead to a vision for 2021 that I’m very excited about. I’ve decided to spend the next year focusing on four ‘systems’ as my primary domains of inquiry – educational systems of knowledge, existential systems of meaning, economic systems of value, and ecological systems of relationship. This focus, along with a desire to untether intellectual exploration from the productivity prerogative and myopic dataism, has lead myself and a couple colleagues at Gensler to launch a “pop-up think tank” called the Functional Fiction Lab. We’ll be formally announcing this and sharing more details in the days and weeks to come.
Third and finally, I recently had the pleasure of talking with Will Little, founder and managing partner of Prota Ventures, on his podcast aptly titled Ventures. I’ve known Will for over a decade; he has been a friend, a mentor, and an inspiration. Our conversations over the years have always been a joy, and I’ve always walked away with greater clarity and bigger questions. We decided to begin recording these conversations and I’m happy to share the first with you. As my brilliant friend Josh Vitulli says, I’m a “long form thinker,” so my thoughts in this conversation are quite layered and I didn’t do the best job of always connecting my answer back to Will’s questions (though the connection was always crystal clear in my mind), so I hope you’ll be patient with me as I learn to be a better conversationalist in the podcasting medium. You can watch this episode below, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts (search for “Ventures”).
I don’t know about you but I’m ready for 2021. It’s been quite the year. I wish you and your family the most joyful of holidays. Take care of yourselves. Wear a mask. Drink some good wine. Get some rest.
Cheers,
– Joel