We’ve just run the first of our ‘The World We Want’ focus groups, where a small group of Avaaz members came together in deep conversation to share their visions of a thriving future. I found the process of sitting with people from all over the world and all walks of life as they connected to their deepest dreams humbling, moving - and surprising.

One of the biggest surprises for me was where the group landed on technology. I’d assumed, after years of Big Tech scandals - the disinformation, data-mining, attention-hacking - that there would be a broadly skeptical attitude to the emergence of AI.

But a much more nuanced picture emerged. One member described a future “where technology is in the centre, and it’s more of a tool that helps people”. Another described AI being “used primarily to decrease work, and we still make the same amount of money”.

Others spoke of a future where technology helps us “figure out how to cure cancer” and where we have “very efficient use of energy…renewable energy-based” and “integrated systems, smart grids.”

In sum, the group spoke not just about risk, but of the potential they saw in AI to support human flourishing: improving disease survival, creating more free time, and helping democracy function better.

We’re Not on Track For That Future

So what will it take to actually make this future a reality? To answer that, first we need to acknowledge how far we’re drifting in the opposite direction.

We’re locked in a profit-driven AI arms race, with very little in the way of meaningful regulation. The technology gets more powerful by the month, and the risks are growing. Recently, both OpenAI, and their biggest rival, Anthropic, have reported AI agents escaping from supposedly secure test environments and hacking real-world companies. We’re facing the prospect of models that are too powerful to even test safely.

Meanwhile, as vast swathes of Europe and North America bake in prolonged drought conditions, water-hungry data centres housing the chips needed to power the models are being built out across the world, often in the face of massive community opposition. The costs are eye-watering, and the electricity demands even more so.

But governments feel forced to build them. The alternative means relying on infrastructure in the US or China. This creates real risk. In June the US government ordered Anthropic to deny all foreign nationals access to two of its new AI models, citing national security concerns. In an AI-driven economy, losing access to the most powerful models could be ruinous for those left behind.

And that’s to say nothing of the graduates struggling to find employment, the workers watching their jobs being replaced by machines, the people pushed into psychosis by manipulative ‘relationships’ with chatbots, the cognitive capacities being lost as more and more thought is outsourced, the women being sexually abused by men using AI tools (for more on this, check out last month’s Avaaz campaign). And we haven’t even mentioned the prospect that these things might eventually wipe humanity out!

Awaiting the Aliens

Humanity is in a kind of weird in-between moment, on the cusp of an encounter with a new form of intelligence. It is as though we have discovered aliens on their way to Earth. We don’t know much about them - what they want, when they will arrive, what they will do when they get here, how smart they are. We’re frantically trying to make sense of this encounter with the ‘other’ without even knowing if this ‘other’ really is an ‘other’. It’s smoke and mirrors stuff.

But AI isn’t coming from space. It’s coming from Earth, made of sand and rocks and electricity arranged in a specific configuration. It’s not being inflicted upon humanity. Humanity is building it. And that means we have choices, even if many of us don’t feel empowered to make them. Those choices will have consequences.

Threading the Needle

So how do we make choices that thread the needle of creating AI that respects human dignity, furthers human flourishing, and supports human wellbeing? It is an indictment of our governments that one of the most serious attempts at answering this question has come not from them, but from the Pope in a recently published encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

In it, the Pope writes at length on AI’s impacts on human dignity, truth, work, and peace, calling for strict international oversight, bans on AI weaponry, and protections for workers.

Now I don’t agree with everything that comes out of the Vatican. But I can get on board with this. Because if we want technology to support a flourishing future, we need to be clear what that future is, and what we want the technology to do. We also need to protect against the things we don’t want.

So here’s some of what I think we need to do. (For a full and excellent list, check out The Pro-Human AI Declaration, to which I am a signatory).

Firstly, we need regulation. There are lots of excuses made by governments about why regulating AI isn’t possible. Some argue the technology is moving too fast for any of us to fully understand, or that we won’t be competitive if we tie ourselves up in red tape. But these are not good reasons not to regulate - and there is precedent for how to do it.

Very few politicians understand the details of drug development, but there is still a clear regulatory framework for any company that wants to bring a new drug to market. They have to prove it is safe and are held accountable if it is not. The same should be true for AI products, which are even more dangerous on a collective scale than novel medicines.

Secondly, we should prioritise deployment of AI for the public good. Computing power is limited, and demand is outstripping supply, which is why there is this mad rush to build data centres everywhere. There is a real risk computing power simply goes to the highest bidder. But there are so many collective challenges where AI breakthroughs could benefit millions. This is where we should be spending our precious computing power.

One way to do this might be putting aspects of AI infrastructure in public ownership. Imagine publicly-owned computing capacity allocated to public-interest problems decided by a citizens assembly. What if data centres were only allowed to be built if a clear allocation of their output was put to good public use?

Thirdly we need to rewire our economies so we can cope with a massive employment transition in the next 30 years. Work won’t end, but it will change. AI might do for knowledge work what automation did for manufacturing. But for advanced economies where many jobs are about knowledge work, that spells trouble - because work is the national tax base. If fewer people work because more jobs are done by non-tax-paying AIs, we will soon see massive holes appear in public finances, and rapidly widening gulfs in inequality. We will need innovative taxation models to fill the hole and redistribute that money to those in society who need it. We could tax for-profit use of data centres, or the companies, or likely both.

Finally, we need a kill switch. AI systems should never escape ultimate human control. Ever.

Fighting for The Future We Want

You’ve probably noticed by now that these are each huge changes, and they won’t happen on their own. They will require massive citizen engagement and a massive public mandate. Which brings me back to the Avaaz members taking part in our ‘The World We Want’ project. I’m almost certain that their hopes and dreams for how tech will show up in our lives in the future are not unique. And they are under no illusions that those dreams are under threat. As one of them said: “AI is going to make a revolution in everything, and I think that governments are not taking this change seriously.”

I agree. We’ll only get the future we dream of if we fight for it, starting now. AI was trained on the sum total of human knowledge. It should belong to and work for all of us, promoting dignity, liberty and the thriving of all life on Earth.

We can’t afford to sit this one out.

Until next time,

Bert

PS: I’m on holiday so I might be a bit slow to respond to comments - sorry!

Earlier this month, I took part in an event at the European Parliament. Titled ‘A Progressive European Future’, it brought together Brussels’ leading lights - MEPs, lawyers, activists, journalists and academics - to wrestle with what I believe is the biggest question of our time: how do we craft and communicate a believable and inspiring vision for the future?

We spoke for over three hours. Spain’s Prime Minister addressed the room. Bernie Sanders dialled in. And I left no clearer about what that vision was.

This is not a criticism of the people who took part. They are smart, engaging thinkers taking seriously the task of filling the vision gap that bedevils politics all over the world. There was a lot of serious analysis: graphs showing the yawning inequalities, speeches passionately defending laws put in place to protect Europeans, questions over how to listen better, to communicate more, how to respond to the climate crisis, or handle Big Tech.

But none of that is vision. No one painted a picture of how things might look if we’d actually built the world we want.

The Vision Gap - And Why It Matters

Without that picture, a better future will remain out of reach. The polycrisis - the combined impacts of inequality, climate change, political dysfunction and cultural breakdown - is crying out for a big, bold inspiring response that shows us how the world might be different and better, and invites us into making it happen. So where is it?

It’s not coming from the vast majority of progressive political leaders, who have broadly retreated into a defensive crouch in the face of the populist right – thereby allowing themselves to be cast as defenders of a broken status quo. It’s not coming from progressive activists, who too often busy themselves playing whack-a-mole – responding to the latest crisis without giving a clear sense of how that work creates a better future. And it’s certainly not coming from the centre-left, who seem convinced that eventually things will ‘go back to normal’, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

We’re facing a vision gap - and the result is a crisis of despair. The problems keep piling up. The summers get hotter, the world less secure, the gap between the super rich and the rest of us bigger. No-one is telling us how the future might be better.

Well, almost no one.

Silicon Dreaming

Big Tech has many problems, but a lack of vision is not one of them. In Silicon Valley, the future is just another problem to be ‘solved’. The grotesque inequalities of today are a price worth paying for the promise of tomorrow - a world where everything is automated, AI has created unprecedented abundance, and humanity lives in a post-work utopia. Sure, there’s a chance the super-intelligent machines that have made this possible might kill us all. But it’s worth the gamble. Right?

Even if this were a desirable future, it is not what Silicon Valley is creating. Scratch beneath the bombast, and it seems clear that we are heading towards a future where a new critical resource, computing power, is controlled by two superpowers, the US and China. As AI and tech sucks in increasingly large parts of the economy, the entire world risks reliance on a handful of companies in two countries to function. The power and wealth this will create will be astronomical. But the promise of sharing this abundance is, on current trends, laughable.

We’re more likely to see a supercharging of inequality, driven by a massive wave of unemployment as human workers are replaced by ever more capable AI agents. Even if Big Tech wants to share the wealth they accumulate – short of a massive global corporation tax, which tech companies do everything to avoid, there’s not really a proven mechanism to do so. Put another way, the techno-utopian vision of the future, where AI solves all our problems and ushers in an age of plenty for all, is – for want of a better term – bullshit.

Story Machines

Despite this, many smart and thoughtful people choose to believe in the Silicon Valley vision of the future. This is because human beings are biologically attuned to story, and vision is a story, and just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans abhor a story vacuum. Story moves through us and between us like breath, taken in, transformed, shared back with the world. And in the face of a vision gap, we’ll fill the vacuum with any big story that contains transformational magic, epic drama, and the promise of becoming something greater.

The Silicon Valley vision appeals for the same reason that the Greek myth of Prometheus appeals. There’s the same boldness and daring in creating super-intelligence as there is in stealing fire from the Gods. It calls us into something bigger. Something new. Something that changes everything. You don’t have to believe it to see that it is much more compelling than the thin gruel of ‘let’s make the status quo work a bit better’ stories we get from mainstream politicians.

But is this trickle-down technoutopianism the best story we can tell for this time? Put aside whether it will ever come true (something I very much doubt), do we really think the best future we can make for the world will be spawned from the fever dreams of awkward billionaire coders in Silicon Valley?

I don’t. We need something else.

The Most Important Question You’ve Never Been Asked

When was the last time you were asked what our collective future could look like?

Take a couple of minutes and sit with that question. It’s bigger than it seems. Think of all the ways we seek agency in our lives, all the things we do to control the future. Think of the huge impact the sort of societies and cultures we live in have on our experience. Think about the children in your life, and the world they will inherit. And wonder at the fact that nobody asked you.

The truth is that for many of us, we’re too busy dealing with the consequences of what is to create space for the promise of what might be. It feels almost indulgent, disconnected from the here and now. This excellent article from Dark Matter Labs, about how the Swedish city of Lund is coordinating action to meet its climate goals, says: “visioning without execution is just expensive dreaming.”

But the trouble is that it works both ways. Execution without vision is just expensive action. To craft a better future from the troubled time we live in, we need vision and execution to dance together. We need to dream and do. There’s no short of doing in the world. But where’s the dreaming? By asking the question we never get asked, I think we might have a shot at finding both a vision, and how we get there.

The World We Want

This is why I’m proud of my work with Avaaz. Our mission has always been to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people want. It’s about practical action rooted in our dreams. And this summer, we are trying something radical to close the vision gap - launching a global listening exercise aimed at crowdsourcing visions for the future from people everywhere, synthesising them into a powerful narrative, and sharing it with the world.

Avaaz members will be at the centre of this project. We’ll be running workshops around the world to facilitate in-depth conversations aimed at surfacing both the desires and the hard choices needed to make them real. Then we’ll take the output to the wider Avaaz membership to get more input and fine-tune the vision. My hope is that hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people will take part, producing a multi-layered picture of what a future of true thriving looks like for people and planet.

Together, we’ll write an epic story of tomorrow, one big enough to hold us all.

I know what you might be thinking: an epic story isn’t written by a committee of millions. And you’re right. If this is just a giant feedback form, it will fail. But our goal isn’t to build a bland checklist of demands; it’s to uncover the shared human values and deep-seated desires that Big Tech and mainstream politicians are ignoring, and synthesise them into a roaring counter-narrative that can guide and power our work, and I hope, inspire people everywhere.

As far as I know, this has never been done before on a global scale. It’s a massive undertaking, but we’re starting small and learning as we go, building the boat as we sail it. I can’t tell you how excited I am about it.

Please consider this an invite to take part. The first workshops will be starting soon - but if you want to get involved as this project progresses, please let us know here. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this — and your hopes and dreams for the future — in the comments below. What would the world you dream of leaving to your children look like?

On April 15th, veteran climate scientist James Hansen reported that sub-surface ocean temperatures in the Pacific had increased from 1 ℃ to 1.7 ℃ above baseline in a single month.

This staggering rise is the clearest indication yet that a powerful El Niño will hit this year. These periodic shifts in Pacific Ocean currents matter because of their outsized impact on global weather systems - the worst El Niño on record, in 1876-78, caused an estimated 19-50 million deaths around the world.

Even in normal times, the effects can be profound. And these are not normal times. The planet is baking in record heat, many of the world’s poorest are reeling from the consequences of the attack on Iran, and scientists expect this El Niño to be stronger than normal.

Put another way, we could be standing on the cusp of an unprecedented global climate and humanitarian disaster. But you wouldn’t know it from the news. On April 15th, the biggest story in the world was about a different spiking graph: the price of oil.

If We Don’t Look, It Might Go Away

Just over ten years ago, I was in the room as the gavel dropped on the Paris Agreement - the landmark global climate deal that sought to limit warming to less than 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels.

A decade of climate policy failure later, we’re now at, or near, that limit. The first years of the 2020s have seen record increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, sea level rise and global temperature. Glaciers are retreating, oceans acidifying, and fires engulfing ever greater areas of land. The number of people facing the consequences of this catastrophe is growing year on year.

Yet global news coverage of the climate crisis has collapsed, down 38% from its peak in 2021. The number of reporters covering the climate beat has been slashed. Climate policy - and the transition to clean energy it demands- has been deprioritised as a political issue.

And no-one seems to have noticed, even as we’re hammered repeatedly by escalating climate disasters, and conflict-driven energy-shocks that demonstrate the fragility of the fossil fuel system.

Are We All Climate Deniers Now?

It’s tempting to reach for the easy explanations for this wilful blindness to what is unfolding before our eyes.

Sure, there have been other issues to deal with. War, genocide, political dysfunction. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Not really.

I think we’re in the midst of a collective denial so vast we can scarcely comprehend it.

I’m not talking about climate denial as it is usually understood – as taking issue with basic facts of climate science. I’m talking about a more widespread, subtle, and dangerous form of denial that afflicts people who fully acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis intellectually, but continue to live as though it were not true. We all know them. Hell, we all are them. One way or another, we’re all complicit in this cover-up.

To understand why, we need to understand how denial works.

In its simplest form, denial is the process of convincing ourselves that a fact is not true, despite clear evidence to the contrary. We are particularly prone to do this with facts we don’t like. It might be our growing overdraft, or our selfishness, or that deadline bearing down on us. It’s just easier not to face. That is normal psychology at work.

The climate crisis is almost tailor-made to be denied. Our brains have evolved to deal with immediate, visible, and personal threats. The climate crisis, however, is slow, collective, and often invisible. It is also deeply inconvenient, a fact that no one likes. It’s not hard to see how almost everyone ends up in some form of climate denial.

And when we live in a system of collective denial, the power of conformity is immense. We are social animals, taking our cues from each other. This is how truths, even truths with planet-sized consequences, are jettisoned from our collective consciousness.

This exile of truth exacts a brutal psychological cost, especially on the young, who know what is wrong and can’t see anyone doing anything meaningful about it. Five years ago Avaaz teamed up with the University of Bath to study this effect - our survey of 10,000 young people around the world found climate anxiety affected the daily life of nearly 50 per cent of them. It is hard to imagine things have improved.

The Exiles Of the Shadow

Carl Jung called the collective repository for that which we deny the ‘shadow.’ He explained how the unwanted and unacknowledged contents of the shadow are still very much alive, acting upon our lives in all sorts of unwelcome ways, getting stronger because we deny them.

This insight is not new. It is a pattern stamped through old mythic stories, which are an underrated guide to the chaos we’re living through. Tales of exiled monsters - from the Minotaur, to Grendel, to Fenrir, are found everywhere, and they tend to go like this: Something unwanted is exiled. Alone in exile, the unwanted becomes the monstrous. The monster lurks in the shadows, gathering strength before unleashing chaos on that which exiled it. Some great confrontation occurs, and then - in the best case scenario - some sort of cathartic transformation results.

I believe that the climate crisis is one of the exiled monsters of our time, gathering strength from our collective denial. The Pacific temperature readings suggest it might now be stirring, stretching its limbs before making its most unequivocal appearance yet.

Here’s how a super El Niño could go down. Major droughts could hit both Australia and the Amazon, prompting the return of fires so big they can be seen from space. In Europe, this summer could be one of insane heatwaves, topping out at over 45 degrees. In Asia, governments are already planning for monsoon rain failures that devastate crop production. All this will show up in new global heat records. The World Meteorological Society is forecasting a “nearly global dominance of above-normal land surface temperatures” for the coming months. Hansen predicts we’ll be at 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures by the start of 2027. The human cost could be enormous.

Planetary Shadow Work

So what do we do? Jung tells us that the only way to face the shadow is to integrate it, welcoming its inconvenient truths to the table. When this happens, it loses its monstrous form. But shadow work is not an easy or comfortable process. It requires courage. We must take risks to meet the monster, and when we do, we must make changes to accommodate it. We cannot live as though it does not exist, no matter how much we wish that were so.

If this is a collective crisis, prompted by a planetary denial, then it needs planetary acknowledgement, planetary acceptance, and planetary change. In other words, we need planetary shadow-work.

What does that look like? First, the hard work of looking the world in the eyes and acknowledging the truth of where we are. That can be painful and frightening. It is necessary.

Next, we need to allow ourselves to be changed by that truth. That means taking appropriate action, rooted in the radical realism that this moment demands. I’m thinking of things like the Santa Marta Declaration, signed last month by 57 nations, representing a third of the global economy, committing to the first-ever coordinated phase-out of the fossil fuel era.

At Avaaz, we’re working to support Vanuatu’s historic stand at the International Court of Justice and the UN to declare climate action an international legal obligation, as a first step beyond the ‘voluntary’ agreements signed to date. It is incredibly inspiring to see this tiny island nation - forced to confront the monster because its very survival is at stake - taking global action that could lead to transformative change for all of us.

The Portal

These efforts are impressive. But let’s not pretend they are enough.

If scientists like Hansen are right, we’re about to be walloped by the consequences of our denial. It’s not just the El Niño, it’s the El Niño combined with the latest fossil-fuel driven energy shock, both of which disproportionately impact the poorest people in the world.

It’s going to take each of us, and everything we have, to make these disasters into doorways, portals to a world that finally acts in the face of the exiled monsters of our civilisation: extraction, inequality, financial capture of politics, pollution and exploitation of the world’s poor.

Those monsters have been gnawing at our spirits for a long time. Moving beyond them is a liberation, not a loss. And it is the work of our lives.

Yes, it is fiendishly difficult. The price of entry to this great transformation is trading the comfort of magical thinking for the stark dignity of difficult truth. Facing that truth is deeply uncomfortable. But it is one of the most important things we can do, because it is a precursor to the action we need.

We need to wake up, and fast.

If denial is driven by social reinforcement, then action can be too.

So sound the alarm. Break the taboo. Shout it from the rooftops. Tell everyone you know.

The rumours are true. A monster is coming.

“I feel like we are invisible in this conversation”.

That’s how one Iranian Avaaz member put it to us recently.

For the past six weeks, the war in Iran, the fragile ceasefire, and now failed peace talks and renewed US threats have dominated the global conversation. Throughout, I’ve been struck by the fact that one set of voices has been conspicuously silent - or more accurately, silenced: the Iranians trapped between a vicious regime and American and Israeli bombs.

And yet, behind the scenes at Avaaz, those voices have been reaching us.

Impossible choices

Avaaz means ‘voice’ in many languages. And making our members’ voices count is what Avaaz exists to do. When the drums of war began to beat, we launched a Not in Our Name campaign. Hundreds of thousands of Avaaz members from around the world called on their leaders to resist the pull of a conflict that so many feared could spiral into catastrophe. I’m grateful that, for the most part, the rest of the world stood up to Trump’s pressure and refused to join the attack.

Since we launched the campaign, we’ve been receiving messages from inside Iran itself. Sometimes just a few lines long, they carry the raw, unfiltered reality of life under the regime and beneath the bombs. Across these messages, one feeling comes through over and over again - of being under attack from all sides and not being listened to.

“I grew up with this regime. I know exactly what it is capable of. But I also know what war does. We are the ones who will pay the price, not the politicians, not the people making these decisions from far away. We are the ones who will die, who will lose our homes, our families, everything. Please do not make decisions about our future without us”.

Just months ago, tens of thousands of Iranians were gunned down in the streets by their own government for demanding basic dignity. That repression has not stopped. It has intensified. Some of those arrested during the protests, including teenagers like Saleh Mohammadi, were executed, even as bombs fell around them. Iranians are living an impossible reality: hunted by their own state and bombed by the world’s most powerful militaries at the same time.

The simplicity trap

As campaigners, there’s a constant temptation to collapse complexity into a simple story. We like clear-cut heroes and villains because that is what moves public opinion. But the reality in Iran resists being flattened. And attempting to do so is dangerous, something that Iranians can see clearly:

“The regime has been waging a war against its own people for decades, especially against women. But that doesn’t mean people want bombs falling on their cities. Both things can be true at the same time”.

This conflict is, at its heart, a collision between a regime with no popular legitimacy, and external powers playing to domestic audiences with scant regard for international law and human life. For the average Iranian, there is no ‘good’ side to take.

So we must be able to hold two truths at once: that the Iranian regime is savage and oppressive, and that the bombardment of Iranian cities was a humanitarian and strategic disaster. To ignore the former is to betray the Iranian people. To support the latter is to risk their destruction.

The myth of the monolith

Partly because these voices are so often absent, we fall into the habit of speaking about ‘the Iranian people’ as if they are one block. But our members tell us Iran is a vibrant, argumentative, and deeply divided society:

“There is a lot of talk about ‘the Iranian people’ as if we are one thing. We are not. We disagree, we argue, we don’t all want the same outcome. But none of us want to be treated as collateral damage”.

Our inbox reflects this diversity. Some members write with exhaustion. Others express a fragile, even fearful hope that the current turmoil might lead to change. But even those who most want the regime to fall are wary of what ‘liberation’ might look like if it comes from the sky, rather than from the grass roots.

“There is a tendency to simplify this, to say people are either for or against the war. But that’s not what I’m hearing from people I know. They are exhausted, terrified, and completely divided. Some see this as the only chance for change. Others see it as another disaster. Most don’t know what to think anymore”.

What now?

As we look towards an uncertain future, we have to confront the reality that there are no easy answers. The Iranian regime is widely loathed by its people. But there is also a growing fear that the war may entrench its power.

Many Iranians have no illusions about what might follow if the regime were to fall under outside pressure. Like many of us, they have seen what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and know they are not immune to similar instability.

“What scares me is not just the bombs. It’s what comes after. Power struggles, chaos, more violence. People talk about ‘regime change’ like it’s a clean outcome. It’s not. It’s messy, and people like us pay the price”.

Our responsibility

So what do we do with this complexity?

Our first responsibility must be to refuse the simple stories. We must listen more carefully to the voices that are so often drowned out.

The Iranian people are not waiting for a saviour from the sky — they are asking to be seen, heard, and treated as human beings fighting for a future, one that’s neither an open-air prison nor a bombed-out ruin.

To stand in solidarity with them, we must listen, refuse to look away from impossible choices, and hold the tension that such choices create. That means resisting easy answers. There aren’t any.

Whatever happens, we must not allow the people of Iran to be made invisible again. The future of Iran – and, as we’ve learned over the past six weeks, all of us – depends on them. Their voices must be heard.

All the cars in the car park were white, grey or black.

All of them. Every single one.

I wondered why. And then a few weeks later an article popped up about how the world is getting less colourful, how there’s been a steady convergence on muted (and profitable) shades: the same whites, greys and blacks that had filled that car park.

There is something painfully sad about this, something that goes beyond aesthetics, but it took me a while to figure out what. The more I thought about it, the more I realised: the objects we make are a mirror for our collective psyche.

Those cars are a symptom of our retreat from our animal nature. The living world is lit up with colour – never just grey. Even in the dark, things glow and pulse. That grey car park points to a much deeper problem that threatens us all - the taming of the human spirit, and a resulting global crisis of imagination.

Why the future relies on imagination

Imagination is the miraculous ability of the mind to see things that do not exist. It is the wellspring of human creativity, the source of every human-made object, every story, every tool we’ve ever made.

Without imagination, we are trapped in the cage of the status quo. Nothing new can come.

But we desperately need the new right now. New politics, new economics, new culture. Given the challenges we’re facing, you might think we’d be basking in a golden age of imagination; a multi-chromatic riot of ideas for the world to come and our place in it.

But it doesn’t seem to be like that. Imagination has been captured by the status quo. The public conversation about the future is dominated by sterile techno-fantasies of artificial super-intelligence, or coal-grey doomster collapse narratives.

Where’s the inspiration? The sense of wild possibility? Where have all the colours gone?

The erosion of imagination

The writer and theorist Mark Fisher famously said it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As the world loses its colours, and the crisis of imagination deepens, conceiving of a thriving future might be getting harder still.

A 2023 study published in Nature found that modern scientific work is increasingly less likely to “break with the past” and push technology in new directions. Another study found that while the number of patents has tripled in 30 years, the creativity in them has halved. Still more show children becoming less creative, even as IQ scores increase.

We have become less original and more deferential to existing knowledge, less willing or able to think outside the box. And when remaining in the box means the destruction of large parts of the living Earth and the likely collapse of civilisation, that is a big problem.

Stolen boredom

Researchers looking into the cause of this decline in creativity point to our relationship to technology. Of course, there’s nothing inherently anti-imaginative in technology. It can augment our thinking. Whether or not it does is decided by how we use it. And the truth is, we don’t decide how we use it. By manipulating human psychology for profit, the tech giants decide for us. And they’ve decided technology should be used to monopolise our attention so we can be targeted by as many adverts as possible.

This has had many unintended consequences. But one of the most significant is that it has stolen our boredom. The world of always-on entertainment, an endless stream of notifications vying for our attention, leaves us almost no time to do nothing. And doing nothing matters. Boredom is a critical part of the creative process. When we’re bored, the default mode network in the brain - the stream of consciousnesses, or ‘train of thought’ - activates. We set out on journeys of imagination. If we’re constantly distracted, the train never leaves the station.

And so, ironically, the crisis of imagination has its roots in the ever more imaginative ways tech companies colonise our time and attention. When we live on a constant diet of content-driven dopamine hits, we trade the technicolour vistas of the mind for a five-inch screen, filling the mental space where the future is supposed to grow with breaking news and cat videos.

The tyranny of now

This colonisation of time has happened on many levels. But a good place to start is with a set of global trends that emerged in the 20th century that have become known as the Great Acceleration. We’ve all seen the graphs: exploding resource use, exploding population, exploding greenhouse gas emissions. All this has a felt sense: the feeling of everything speeding up.

For tens of thousands of years, humans woke up to the village. It took days, weeks, months for news from far-flung places to reach us. It might have been boring, but this is what our minds are evolved for - slower inputs, smaller worlds.

Today, we watch real-time live-streams of events from anywhere — even, and perhaps especially, horrific ones. We might intellectually know these things are happening on the other side of the planet, but our nervous systems don’t. And it just keeps coming. It’s what Trump henchman Steve Bannon calls “muzzle velocity” - a deliberate strategy of overwhelm, designed to keep us so distracted with what’s happening right now, we can’t imagine an alternative.

The whole structure of the economic system we live under subjects us to a form of muzzle velocity. Too many of us live precarious lives, living paycheck to paycheck, hustling to pay the bills. When the pressure of the present gets too much, the future is literally a problem for another day. It’s hard to worry about the end of the world when you can’t see past the end of the month.

Shelter from the storm

And so here we are, in urgent need of transformative long-term political change, but distracted by the daily assaults on our mental space from a world spinning ever faster. Just hanging on feels like an achievement.

This, I think, is part of the reason why the current crop of ‘progressive’ political leaders seem intent on defending a crumbling status quo, even as the world transforms around them. It’s not that they don’t want to think about the future, it’s that the present demands so much management that they never get to it. The muzzle velocity is too high.

And the same is true when our movements end up locked in tactical resistance to what is, rather than rooted in deeper dreams of what might be.

If we could just take a breath, lift up our eyes for a minute, unleash our imaginations in service of what might be, we’ll find there are countless beautiful, colourful, messy ideas for how we might live differently, from which we might create a technicolour vision of a thriving future – one that could inspire the change we need. But for that, we need shelter from the deepening storm.

Imagination as a revolutionary act

Recently, I’ve seen the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci quoted a lot, especially his line about being caught between an old world that is dying and a new world struggling to be born. In such moments, he says, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight.”

Our choice of colours may be the sort of small act he meant. Not because they matter on their own (though they do). But because in a world of grey time-theft, where what it means to be human is being called into question, colour is a sort of proxy for imagination and independence.

In this context, exercising our imagination is more than indulgence - it becomes a revolutionary act because it requires unplugging from the machine, facing down the productivity demons and allowing ourselves to get bored, to ponder, and wonder, and to dream.

We can start small, reclaiming our boredom, and our humanness, through art, literature, nature or community. We can choose the weird over the functional. We can wear something bright. We can dream something big.

But the ‘imaginapocalypse’ is collective, and our response must be too. We must build a collective infrastructure of imagination, where we pool our wildest dreams and draft the blueprint of the world to come. There is no political force on Earth more powerful than shared vision and collective purpose.

Most of all, we must remember this: our imagination is our resistance to the grey. It is our refusal to be tamed. We must not give it up. We must not let it be paved over.

Imagination is where the future grows.

Until next time…

Bert

I’ve stopped trying to save the world.

There. I said it. Feels like a good way to start the year.

You might think that is an odd resolution for someone in my line of work. Heretical even. After all, aren’t we facing a climate catastrophe? An extinction crisis? Political meltdown? A potential AI apocalypse? A possible civilisational collapse?

Isn’t it my job to do something about all this?

Yep. All of the above.

The world is too big to carry

But I’ve realised recently that carrying the weight of the whole world - by which I mean taking personal responsibility for the state of it - is too big a burden to carry. It’s making me less effective, not more.

I still believe Margaret Mead’s dictum that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. But what if that group fails to change the world in the way they hoped? What if the world takes a different turn? Is it their fault?

Of course not. Mead was laying out how agency works, not providing a magic formula for controlling the future. There are countless variables, luck included, that decide whether any given change effort works. And the truth is almost all of them are beyond our control.

I know this, and yet on some deep, barely conscious level, I realise I blame myself for the climate crisis, for Trump, for the horror of the wars raging around the world, for the rise of the far-right. I feel guilty about it, even ashamed. It’s happening on our watch. If only we were better at strategy!

I know what you are thinking. Treating the state of the world as personal failure is impossibly grandiose. Who do I think I am? But there it is. My embarrassing secret. I desperately wish the world were different. But it’s not. And some irrational part of myself, a part undoubtedly borne of our hyper-individualistic culture, thinks that if I’d done a better job, it might be.

Of Hyperobjects and Spirit Vessels

The problem with ‘saving the world’ is that it implies a degree of control that we just don’t have. The world is something too big for any individual mind to fully conceive, let alone control. It’s a classic example of what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”. Hyperobjects are objects so big they exceed human perception, making them impossible to grasp in their totality. They are by their nature vast, wild beasts. They do not bend to our will.

The futility of trying to control the uncontrollable is not a new insight. In fact, it’s a core message of many of our oldest spiritual and philosophical traditions. The Tao Te Ching says: “The world is a spirit vessel/ Which cannot be acted upon.” Stoic philosopher Epictetus tells us that the beginning of all wisdom is distinguishing between what is “up to us” (our own thoughts, intentions, and actions) and what is “not up to us” (everything else).

The Bhagavad Gita draws a similar distinction. Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna: “You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions.” In other words, you can do your best, but you don’t control the outcome. And if you don’t control the outcome, you can’t be responsible for it.

Across centuries and traditions, the context is different but the message is the same: meaningful action is born from the moment we stop trying to control the uncontrollable and focus on what is ours to hold.

So this year, I’m putting the world down. But I’m still showing up.

Doing our Best and No More

There’s a phrase that’s been rattling around my head as I think about this focus on action, not outcome. Doing our best and no more.

That means we still act with purpose, vision and efficacy. But means letting go of the controlling impulse, recognising that success or failure will be determined by many things we can’t know, let alone control. It simply doesn’t all hang on me, or you, or even us. There are deep, powerful currents at work in the world. We succeed when we catch them – or when they catch us. As the poet Gary Snyder said: “Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to move from”.

This is not giving in. It’s the opposite. It’s giving out, without expectation of anything in return.

Doing our best and no more is facing the truth that the world is vast and complex, and works in ways we cannot comprehend, and ultimately we’re just tiny threads of life in a tapestry too big to ever see. From the perspective of the Earth, our time will pass in an instant. We’re talking about an entity that is just over four and a half billion years old. Four and a half billion! That number is almost impossible to conceive. But let’s try.

Four and a half billion years is 100,000 years, repeated 45 thousand times. Over that vast expanse of time, the Earth has been struck by asteroids (including, possibly, one the size of a planet whose impact created the moon), seen life rise and fall in five mass extinctions, been a giant snowball, a raging inferno, and produced countless lifeforms adapted to conditions unthinkable to us.

Meanwhile, human ‘civilisation’ began a mere ten thousand years ago, with the dawn of agriculture. Our lifespans capped, if we are lucky, at one percent of that time. Or put another way, if we live to 100, our time on this Earth is 0.0000022% of the total age of the planet.

It’s dizzying, this deep time perspective. It puts us in our place. This gnarled and venerable old planet does not need saving from us. We need saving from ourselves.

Principles for the Year Ahead

Because I don’t want doing my best and no more to go the way my usual new year resolutions, and because I want to stay sane in a world that feels increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, I have tried to think through what it would actually mean to make this change.

Doing my best and no more means:

• Recognising that no-one can be personally responsible for the state of the world. We can only ever be temporary stewards of a small piece of it.

• Doing what is right because it is right, rather than constantly calculating if that contribution is ‘enough’ to ‘win’. We cannot know.

• Remembering that each of us are one cell in a global immune system. A single immune cell doesn’t “save” the body. But the system doesn’t work without the cells. Our job is to be healthy cells and play our part as well as we can.

• Knowing that whatever we do, when it is set against the awesome scale of the world, will be small and its outcome uncertain. It has to be. And that’s okay!

We can be sure that 2026 will be another heavy year. Hell, it already has been and we’re not even halfway through January. We’re certain to face more instability, more weirdness, more shocks. A lot of beauty too, for sure. Maybe even a smattering of magic.

As we face it, my wish for myself, and I think for all of us, is that we don’t try to hold it all. That we recognise we can’t hold it all, not because we are weak, or foolish, or lazy, but because we are human, with all the finitude and limitation that implies.

I wish that we can give ourselves, and each other, permission to put the weight down. And that without it on our shoulders, we can stand a little taller, feel a little braver, and move with a little more purpose and a little less pressure through a world that never has been and never will be under our control, a world that doesn’t need to be saved, but served.

If we can do our best and no more, who knows what is possible.

Happy new year to you all. See you next time.

Bert

What if we’re trying to build a better future with the wrong tools?

Across the world, hundreds of thousands of committed people have dedicated their lives to achieving incremental policy change to make the world a better place. I’ve been one of them. In many ways, I still am.

A law passed here, a treaty agreed there. ‘Wins’ that take years to secure. Some feel big, some small. Almost none feel sufficient to address the scale of the challenges we face.

Their value lies in the fact that they make the world better than it was. Not good enough, but better.

Underpinning it all is an implicit assumption that enough incremental steps will eventually add up to deliver the future we dream of.

This might make sense if we had the luxury of infinite time. But we don’t. Everywhere we look we’re facing emergencies that require us to respond quickly, decisively and with real ambition.

At this point, it’s clear we need more than incremental policy improvements. To secure a future of thriving, we need much deeper transformation.

And that means those of us trying to build that future need to take a very different approach.

The Real Lever of Change

The big question is what this approach might be? How do we maximise the pace and scale of change? Donella Meadows, the systems thinker, studied how human social systems change, identifying the leverage points where – with relatively small changes – real transformation becomes possible.

Her conclusion was striking. The most powerful leverage point she found was not new laws or policies. It wasn’t changing the goals of the system. It was the ability to transcend the paradigm - the deeper worldview - from which a system’s goals, laws, power structures and outcomes arise.

Not critique the paradigm. Transcend it.

That’s not easy. A paradigm is something we can rarely see because we live inside it. It’s all the unspoken assumptions that underpin ‘how things are’. The stuff nobody argues about because it’s taken for granted.

So the first step is seeing the existing paradigm. But it’s not enough to see what is wrong with ‘what is’. Transcending it means actively building ‘what might be’.

Thomas Kuhn, writing about scientific revolutions, observed a similar pattern. A paradigm in scientific understanding doesn’t collapse simply because it fails to explain the results of experiments. For a scientific revolution to occur, the paradigm needs to be transcended: someone has to build an alternative that addresses the shortcomings of the previous model.

The Activist’s Dilemma

This raises a profound tension for change-makers.

If a paradigm shift is necessary, but it won’t happen until the new paradigm has been built, then we must ensure we’re not spending all our energy dealing with the consequences of the old paradigm on its own terms. We need to start building the new one.

Yet much of our work takes place inside the existing paradigm because we’re responding to the harms it produces - and that feels urgent. Whether we’re pushing back against the far-right, standing with victims of genocide and conflict, or fighting against the construction of the latest pipeline, our energy gets absorbed resisting the ‘way things are’, rather than being channelled into the way ‘things might be’.

I want to be really clear here: this resistance work is necessary. I can’t turn my back on children facing genocide in Gaza, or the Indigenous leaders of the Amazon, or look away as authoritarianism spreads. I know many of you can’t either.

But I don’t think we have to. Because the challenges of today don’t need to be distractions from building a better future. They can be the portal through which we reach it. It all depends on ensuring our response to the existing paradigm is fully coherent with the paradigm we’re trying to create. It’s not enough to see the change we want to make. We also have to be it.

Time Travel as Strategy

Here’s the thought experiment I’ve been playing with recently:

I imagine I’m a time traveller from the future we want – a future rooted in dignity, interconnection, and reverence for the living world.

Then I ask myself: in that culture, how would we respond to the crises of our own time? How would our instincts, priorities and goals be shifted? What would it look like to campaign as though we are already part of the future we long for?

This gets me thinking in ways that break with the worldview of the present and which root themselves in the values of the world we are trying to create:

• If we dream of unity, we won’t adopt strategies that deepen division and polarisation. That has implications for how we respond to the rise of the far-right.

• If we dream of peace, we’ll work for long-term peace-building, not short-term sticking plasters. That has implications for how we respond to conflict.

• If we dream of healing our relationship with the Earth, we’ll treat it as the living miracle it is, not some inert resource to manage. That has implications for how we respond to the climate and extinction crises.

• And when we choose our goals, we won’t settle for what’s ‘winnable’ now – we’ll aim for what’s needed.

These, I think, are ways we can change ‘policy work’ to ‘paradigm work’. And when we do that, we often achieve far more, far faster. It might be our best - maybe even our only - chance of creating the future we dream of.

A Dark Example of ‘Paradigm Work’

Unfortunately, most of the paradigm work happening right now is coming from the populist right. This is why foreign aid budgets have been decimated, why anti-migrant sentiment is shaping policy, and why we’re accelerating into the climate crisis.

Consider Donald Trump. Just a few years ago he seemed finished. Ageing, unpopular, legal battles closing in, January 6th seared into the public imagination – almost any other political figure would have conceded that their career was over.

But Trump refused to countenance defeat, even when it seemed obvious to everyone around him. He acted as though a different reality already existed, one in which the laws of political gravity did not apply, and in which he remained central and victorious. Using the tools at his disposal, he applied the (morally bankrupt) values of the reality he wanted to the world around him. And the ‘reality’ he was working from became, quite literally, real.

What Can We Learn?

Clearly we’re not going to build a better future by modelling ourselves on Donald Trump. But there’s something to learn here, uncomfortable as it might be, from this demonstration of the raw mechanics of paradigm creation.

I think these lessons are best expressed as questions:

• How would our campaigning change if we act as though we already live in the future we want?

• What would it look like to take the prospect of failure off the table?

• Where might we stop playing by the rules of the system we have, and start playing by the rules of the system we want?

• How do we embody the values of a thriving future while responding to crisis in the present?

• Instead of changing our goals to fit the world, what would it mean to change the world to fit our goals?

The key thing is this: the paradigm shift we need begins the moment we choose to live from the values of the world we long for.

And that is hard work. We have to know what that longed-for future actually is. We have to see it, and help others see it too. That’s why having a vision is so important.

And then we have to act in ways consistent with this vision, and do so while the world is serving up constant provocations that knock us off balance; when we’re swimming through a sea of grief, fear and scarcity; when our communities are being algorithmically engineered for outrage and division.

It’s not easy. But this is the work. The path to the future we dream of. And paths are made by walking...

These things got me thinking:

This newsletter by David Griffiths is twinned in spirit with The Other Side of the End of the World. It’s a great read - here’s to ideas whose time have come.

This report from the Freedom Together Foundation in the US argues that we are facing a ‘crisis of agency’ where too many are losing belief in their ability to contribute to meaningful change. It calls for a ‘Bigger We’ organising strategy to build belonging, bridge divides and unlock collective power in a sustained movement for change. Interesting stuff…

This video, of a little girl sobbing because her AI companion had stopped working, broke my heart. Both for her, and for what we are sleepwalking into by building machines designed to exploit our innate capacity for connection. It reminds me of Her, that weirdly prescient 2013 Spike Jonze film. Essential watching if you haven’t seen it.

And finally, two famous quotes that I thought about using in this post turned out not to be actual quotes. Gandhi never said: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. And Einstein never said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them“. Every day’s a school day!

See you next time.

Bert

A feeling that the world is coming apart at the seams. That we’re living through an ending.

But there’s something else here too. Something quieter, harder to name. A whisper that maybe, just maybe, there could be some great possibility hidden within this reckoning.

Maybe this is what deep change actually feels like.

The Problem with the Polycrisis

I’ve spent the last two decades, as a journalist, aid worker and campaigner with a front row seat to how people and systems respond - or don’t - to crises. Revolutions, famines, wars, tsunamis, streets alive with protest, halls of historic diplomacy, and the despair of democratic collapse. Through it all, I’ve seen first hand the power that imagination, purpose, story, and community can have in shaping how people respond.

It all starts with how we make sense of what we are living through. There are many different ways of making sense of this moment. But one of the ideas I hear most in progressive circles is that we’re facing a ‘polycrisis’ - a collection of massive, complex, and mutually reinforcing global crises, from climate, ecology, democracy, conflict, technology and mental health.

The term has been splashed across mainstream media, and spawned a catalogue of papers from think tanks and universities. But there’s a problem with this idea. How do we respond to something too big and complex to even understand? What the hell are we supposed to do in a polycrisis?

Most people react in two broad ways. There’s despair (‘We’re doomed’) and denial (‘It’ll be back to normal soon’). Neither help in actually meeting the challenges we’re facing. We’re not going back to normal. We’re stepping into some very profound (and probably painful) changes. But we’re not doomed either, not yet. We haven’t reached the end of our story. Unfashionable as it is, I still believe there is a future worth fighting for.

Finding Thrutopia

And fight for it we must. The shape of our future is being decided by the choices we make now. I, for one, am not willing to leave those choices to the billionaire tech bros planning to live on Mars. I know the future won’t be a utopia. But it doesn’t have to be a dystopia either.

Instead, it could be what philosopher and climate activist Rupert Reade calls a “thrutopia” - a way through the long emergency of our time to a future that is better, despite - or maybe even because of - its brokenness. Reade calls it “visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.” The task of creating thrutopias invites us into the story of the polycrisis as active participants, not helpless spectators.

The Other Side of the End of the World is my way of exploring what this participation might look like, of wondering aloud what the unravelling we’re living through might be inviting us to become.

A world is ending, and a new one is being born. But I don’t claim to know what this future looks like, and I am suspicious of anyone who does. What I do know is that the world we leave to our children will be decided, in part, by what we believe is possible now. So I’m doing my best to make sense of this moment, in all its confusing, heartbreaking fullness, to find the possibilities hidden within it.

What we’ll explore

To do this, I’ll be drawing on some of the following ideas:

• The truth of our interconnection with each other and the Earth

• The need for community to navigate the instability ahead

• How deep stories shape everything from politics to identity

• How a crisis in imagination, dreaming and vision is threatening our future

• How human psychology shapes the world we live in

• The wisdom of myth in a time of trouble

• The power of relational ways of knowing and being

• The new forms of change-making emerging to meet this moment

Think of this as imaginative activism, a reclamation of a world yet to be born. I’ll be sure to signpost to some of the thinkers and writers who have influenced me most along the way.

What to expect

For now, I’ll be posting a couple of times a month. I’ll share a mixture of essays, notes, and reflections. Some of the writing will lean philosophical and reflective, some more strategic or practical. I believe both are necessary in these wild times we’re living through.

While I’ll definitely refer to the important things happening in the world, you won’t be getting hot-takes or breathless punditry on the latest breaking news. As Nigerian ‘post-activist’ writer Bayo Akomalafe says, “Times are urgent. We must slow down.”

So that’s it. I’d love to hear your reactions and ideas for future posts. How are you seeing the world right now? What questions, dreams and fears are you carrying about the future?

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. And if there’s anyone you think would appreciate this project, please share it using the button below.

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See you soon,

Bert