All the cool kids are revolutionaries.
In college, it was the activists. We’d work day and night organizing for change on and off campus. We wanted to make a dent in the world. In our bubble, the revolutionaries were the anti-capitalists, the Marxists, the guys who read Paulo Freire and the girls who recited Audre Lorde. We knew that our work wasn’t going to fundamentally change society overnight – or even in four years – but we carried on the education and tradition. The students owned the revolution.
Then you graduate. Your circles and lifestyle change, and so does the revolution. In the real world, the revolutionaries are technologists. They’re the ones with the power. They’re the ones disrupting, democratizing, and often damaging the world around them. The activists still exist, but how do they stand up to the technologist? Elon runs Twitter (cough “X”), so you can’t say much there. Your Substack post on AI safety might’ve had some memes that made Sam Altman giggle, but it didn’t change policy. Apple might preach privacy, but they can pull the rug overnight.
Everything is changing every single day. Technological development is accelerating faster than ever before. The medium is the message, but what happens when the yesterday’s media isn’t today’s? If revolution is about overthrowing the current order and replacing it with a new one, then every day is a revolution.
I’ve had the opportunity to work on a few cool projects recently that gave me the space to really go deep on frontier technologies – AI, crypto, energy, etc. – and their implications, macro and micro. Much will continue to be said, some right and some wrong. But one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that we’re accelerating toward a future in which the very environment in which we live is attacking our minds, hearts, and souls.
You could argue that we already live in such a world, but I’m cautiously optimistic. The attack will be inevitable once society has settled. In the midst of acceleration, we can still take the wheel, and doing so will require each of us – every single person – to make choices that are in personal and communal alignment.
That work is, first and foremost, introspective. You’ve gotta go inward before you understand what’s next, and that reflection is a lifelong process. But the battle against our built environment won’t be fought on the scale of the nation-state or the NGO. It’ll be fought on the edges of the network, the lines connecting each and every node.
It’s not revolutionary to seek to disrupt the fabrics of society — technology does that every day. Today’s revolutionary is the one who takes hold of their own moral compass and and aligns their heart, their words, and their work.