From Doom & Gloom to Optimism & Hope, by William E. Halal, (PhD); The TechCast Project and George Washington University. Gerd adds: Bill is a like-minded thinker, friend and fellow futurist, based in Washington DC. Check out his latest must-read book ‘Beyond Knowledge‘, and the video / live-stream event we did together last year. TechCast Research takes on the deadening […]
Talking Across Differences: A Paradigm for Raising Consciousness by William Halal
This article focuses on one of the great challenges facing all of us today – how can we resolve the raging conflicts fomented by social media?
Conflict has always been a problem, but the digital revolution has raised it into one of the great challenges of our time. Facebook and other social media platforms inherently provoke the differences that drive today’s wave of “post-factual” nonsense. Statistica reports that 70 percent of Internet users think fake news causes confusion, and 83 percent say disinformation harms politics. One analyst framed the problem this way: “In the past, wars were conducted with weapons. Now it’s through social media.”
Leading with Hope by Jackie Nagtegaal
In 2018, Bill Gates guest-edited an edition of Time Magazine, which focused on optimism. According to Gates, “being an optimist doesn’t mean you ignore tragedy and injustice. It means you’re inspired to look for people making progress on those fronts, and to help spread that progress more widely” (Gates, 2018). In the same year, Steven Pinker published Enlightenment Now and the Roslings published Factfulness; both of which make a clear case that the world is better than we think. These were all attempts to counteract the paranoid pessimism of our time.
Shaping the Future of Journalism by Puruesh Chaudary
Social media, citizen journalism, AI-based reporting systems, big data, auto-generated news articles – with so much disruption happening, what will the future of journalism be? How will it survive all of these drastic shifts? Puruesh Chaudhary tackles these very questions in her chapter, “Shaping the Future of Journalism” and offers up foresight journalism as a potential solution. In this small interview, Puruesh tells us about herself, her chapter, her current projects, and what actions she believes would lead to a better future for us all.
The Transformation Series by Peter Leyden
The Transformation is a series of stories about the future history of America & the world from 2020 to 2050 as told by a Gen Z character in 2100. The popular series with more than 50,000 followers in Medium is a positive yet plausible narrative about how we can solve the many challenges of our time & build a much better future. Through this page you can get oriented and see an overview in order of all 6 stories linked to Medium (click on the images below). Or you can go directly to Medium but they display the stories in reverse order (blog-style) with the most recent one first: medium.reinvent.net
The Road Not Taken by Bob Leonard
What if, instead of imposing our western culture on indigenous peoples all over the world, we adopted their cultures? We would not be in the mess we are in today.
How Future Generations Will Remember Us
History is a long series of moral abominations.
Doomscrolling – How your news feed gives you a negative worldview
Murder, war, and famine. What we doomscroll happens every day on earth. But we must understand that the news is a report of the worst that happens every given day. That is why we must balance our worldview.
The World Really Is Getting Better
Talking with Bill Gates about progress, the best news in the world, and the future of food.
Switzerland Could Be the First Country to Ban Factory Farming
That conundrum is playing out on dinner plates across Europe. On the one hand, a rising concern with animal welfare and an awareness of agriculture’s environmental impact, especially when it comes to climate change (animal husbandry contributes 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions), has translated into a broad and growing movement to reduce meat consumption and improve the conditions under which livestock are raised.