The reverse-Turing framing2 is doing useful work. It names something. But the flattening also obscures what is actually happening underneath, which is the latest jagged step in a much longer arc, going back to the first photographic portrait, of the subject of a mediating technology learning who is on the other side of it.

That arc is worth tracing in compressed form, because the WSJ piece reads differently when you place it inside the timeline, and because the new wrinkle in it (which is real) is more specific than “humans want to seem human.”

Mediated presence: a brief history of performing to a technologically abstracted audience

Daguerreotype era, roughly 1830s through 1850s. Photographic portraiture is brand new. The medium has no prior conventions for the subject to inherit. People sit very still, partly because exposure times demand it, but also because they do not yet know what a person photographed does. The sitter’s face is uncomposed in any social sense; it is just present in front of a piece of equipment whose downstream effects are difficult to anticipate.

It is worth noticing that the early portrait subjects were not unsophisticated. They were dealing with a genuinely new genre.3 Mark Twain, who knew the medium well, refused to smile for photographs and put the reasoning plainly: “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.” That is a coherent theory of mediated presence: the image will outlast you, will be seen by people you do not know, in conditions you cannot anticipate, so do not be caught looking like a fool in it. That theory is not naive. It is one of the earliest documented examples of a person reasoning about an asynchronous, dispersed, future audience.

Carte de visite era, late 1850s through the 1870s. Small, inexpensive portraits begin to circulate. People exchange them, paste them into albums, send them. The International Center of Photography has a useful framing of this period: the carte de visite was, in effect, the first widely circulating personal-image medium, and its subjects were already engaged in what Alice Marwick would much later call social surveillance. Sitters chose poses, props, and clothing with the explicit anticipation of dissemination. The photograph was no longer a one-off object for a sitting room wall. It was something that traveled. The subject had to start composing for a public they would never meet face to face.

Kodak Brownie era, 1900 forward. The camera is now in the hands of children and amateurs. Marc Olivier’s history of the Brownie tracks how the $1 camera released in 1900 sold ten million units in five years and pulled photography out of the studio and into ordinary life. Photography stops being a destination and starts being an ambient practice. The subject of a photograph is now sometimes also the person taking the photograph an hour later. The schema for being-photographed becomes part of ordinary social competence.

Mid-century. Smiling for the camera is gradually normalized as the expected expression. Time has a clean piece on this transition: smiles do not become standard in photographic portraits until the 1920s and 1930s, substantially reinforced by Kodak’s own advertising, which trained people on what a “good” photograph of a person looked like. “Say cheese” is taught as a literacy, transmitted across generations, and runs through most of the twentieth century. The reverse-Turing test of the moment, if you wanted to describe it that way, was whether you knew how to perform appropriate liveliness on demand.

Cinéma vérité reckoning, 1960s. Documentary filmmaking has to confront, theoretically, what photographers had quietly understood for a century: the camera changes the subject. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (1961) is partly an extended argument that the camera’s presence is itself part of what the camera is recording, and that pretending otherwise produces a worse document, not a more honest one. The opposing posture, direct cinema, tries to minimize the perturbation. Both posit a self-aware subject. Both implicitly accept that the subject knows the audience exists.

The webcam and early YouTube era, late 1990s to mid-2000s. This is the period that gets flattened in retrospect, and is worth looking at slowly, because it is where the texture of audience-awareness shifts in a way that does not quite match what came before or what came after.

Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam, which ran 24/7 from her dorm room from 1996 to 2003, is a useful baseline. Ringley was at one point being watched by millions of people, and her stated position on it was: “I don’t feel I’m giving up my privacy. Just because people can see me doesn’t mean it affects me — I’m still alone in my room, no matter what. And as long as what goes on inside my head is still private, I have all the space I need.” That is a theory of the audience that becomes almost impossible to hold ten years later. The audience is a fact, but the subject is asserting that the fact is bounded by the camera frame and does not migrate.

The first YouTube video, Jawed Karim’s “Me at the zoo”, uploaded April 23, 2005, has the same texture. It is nineteen seconds of one of the site’s co-founders standing in front of an elephant enclosure with no apparent script and no apparent reason for the audience to be there. The camera is held by someone (Yakov Lapitsky), the speaker addresses it, and the resulting artifact has none of the conventions that would become standard inside a few years. There is no opening, no sign-off, no styling, no acknowledgement that the audience could be anybody on earth. It is one person speaking to a recording device and a friend, in a way that has already become hard to do unselfconsciously.

The anthropologist Michael Wesch’s 2008 Library of Congress lecture, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, and the related paper the following year, took on this question directly. The paper’s title says most of what needs to be said: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam. Wesch’s image for what happens when an early vlogger faces the lens is exact: “The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and space — virtually all possible contexts — in on itself.” His subjects are visibly struggling with a problem that did not yet have a working vocabulary, much less a developed literacy.

Home video, roughly 2003 to 2007. Watch footage of high school students from this period, the kind of clips that have surfaced on archive accounts and personal YouTube uploads. There is a particular quality of being on camera in that footage that has mostly dropped out of contemporary recording. The subjects often look, in retrospect, almost unguarded, because the schema for being filmed all the time is not yet installed. The camera was somebody’s parents’ camcorder, or the school’s news team’s, or a friend’s. Footage was watched in specific contexts. It did not yet flow at low friction across platforms and search results. The literacy of being-on-camera was situational and bounded, much closer to the carte de visite subject’s understanding of a single image traveling to known recipients than to what would come next.

Smartphones, late 2000s onward. Everyone is now a camera, always. The cultural shift is well-tracked: a recent psychological study of toddlers in what the researchers call the “selfie generation” found that 95% had been recorded on a phone or tablet in the previous month and 42% were being filmed at least weekly. That is a baseline of mediated self-presentation that previous generations did not have to integrate before they could speak. The subject’s awareness of the audience moves from situational to ambient. Being on camera is no longer an event; it is a background condition. The naïveté in 2000s high school footage is partly that the subjects in it are still reasoning about specific cameras held by specific people. Within a decade, that reasoning has to expand to anyone who might ever pick up a phone in the same room.

Platforms, 2010s onward. Erving Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life had already given a vocabulary for treating ordinary social life as performance with audiences, front-stage and back-stage. Danah boyd and Alice Marwick’s work on context collapse and the imagined audience names what happens when those previously separated audiences are flattened into one undifferentiated public by social media. By the late 2010s, the literacy expected of an ordinary person mediating their own self-presentation online is already wildly beyond anything a Victorian sitter or even a 2003 high schooler would have recognized.

Now. The opening Wall Street Journal piece.

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From Mediated Presence to Competing for Viability and Authenticity against Generated Content

The temptation is to file this latest move as more of the same on a curve that has been bending in the same direction for almost two hundred years. Subjects become more aware of audiences; performance becomes more elaborate; literacy demands compound. By that read, the writer adding typos is just the latest iteration: an audience-aware human composing for dissemination, the way the carte de visite sitter or the early YouTuber was.

That read is partly right and partly missing the point.

What is genuinely new in the WSJ piece is not the degree of audience-awareness. The carte de visite sitter, the cinéma vérité subject, the early YouTuber, and the contemporary writer are all reasoning about asynchronous, dispersed audiences whose composition they cannot fully see. What is new is the category of audience they are now reasoning about.

For the entire arc from the daguerreotype to last decade, the audience the subject was learning to anticipate was, eventually, going to be composed of other people. Other people with eyes, other people with their own cameras, other people with cultural expectations, other people with biases, other people who might forward the photo, the video, the post. The literacy that was developing was a literacy about other human viewers, refracted through whatever technology was in between.

The writers in the WSJ piece are reasoning about an audience that includes non-human readers and non-human writers. The pressure has shifted. Previous versions were about being seen well by an audience whose attention was scarce. The current version is about being distinguishable from an audience-adjacent population whose output is functionally infinite, whose surface conventions overlap heavily with the subject’s own, and whose presence at any given reading of a piece of writing cannot be ruled out.

The “ickiness” Sarah Suzuki Harvard described picks up on something specific. It is the experience of having to actively differentiate one’s own output from a flood of plausibly-similar output produced by an asynchronous, ambient, partly-invisible other category of writer who shares the same surface conventions a careful prose stylist would. The differentiation is not optional. The work of pre-emptively distinguishing yourself happens inside the writing itself, before the writing leaves your hands, at the level of word choice and sentence rhythm and yes, em dash placement.

That is a different kind of audience problem. The Victorian sitter worried about looking foolish in front of strangers. The contemporary writer is worrying about being mistaken for a process. The previous literacies were about composing the self for human reception. The current literacy is partly about composing the self in a way that survives non-human imitation.

It is worth being precise about which part of this is the new pressure. The imagined audience was already strange. Context collapse was already strange. The new thing is that the imagined audience now contains imagined generators: writers, painters, voices, faces, some of which can produce output indistinguishable from the subject’s own, and the subject is now responsible for differentiating themselves from those imagined generators in advance.4

The literacy required is not yet stable. It will move. The current crop of “tells” (em dashes, lists of three, certain words, certain rhythms) will not stay reliable as tells, partly because models will adapt, partly because human writers will absorb the patterns until the patterns stop being legible as artificial, partly because the detection tools are already producing false positives at rates that suggest differentiation-by-surface-style is unstable as a long-term strategy.5

We would do well to consider where the tells come from; academic and historical literature has served as training for professionals as well as AI. If hallmarks of rigor and erudition are now blurred with with inauthenticity signaling — UC Berkeley School of Law and arXiv both have taken harsh stances this month to address such — that will be an interesting problem space to tackle.

There is also a second move worth noting, opposite in direction to the typo-planting one. Ryan Johnson, one of the writers in the WSJ piece, described what happened when he tried using AI to draft his blog posts: “It’s like the restaurant that starts to water down the soup. People don’t leave immediately, but eventually they’re like, eh, it doesn’t have the same kick.” He quit. Both moves are responses to the same pressure. One adds noise on the way out to seem human. The other strips out the generative shortcut on the way in to remain human in a way the noise-adding move is already conceding cannot be done from the surface alone.

Two things are likely to follow.

The first is a continued, escalating round of surface-level mimicry-and-counter-mimicry. The “say prunes” of 2026 is the deliberate typo, the planted Office reference, the artisanal short dash, the unstructured aside that breaks the rhythm a model would produce. Some of it will work for a while. Most of it will get absorbed into the model distribution within a year or two. The signal-to-noise of stylistic tells has already started to invert, and there is no reason to think the curve flattens any time soon.

The second is more interesting, and more durable. The non-surface literacies for being human at this moment will become load-bearing in ways they were not before. The capacities that are hard to fake at scale (sustained argument that builds across a body of work, claims grounded in specific operational experience, intellectual positions held across years and revised in the open, the kind of through-line that takes a person to develop and a person to keep alive) become more valuable, partly because they are increasingly the things that can still differentiate human from synthetic at altitude. Johnson’s instinct, that watered-down soup gets noticed eventually, is the version of this argument that does not require theory.

This is the part that connects to the broader project I have been writing about. The arrangements we inherited were legible because they had stabilized into recognizable forms. The arrangements we are entering are not yet legible, and the work of the next few years for anyone composing themselves into a mediated, asynchronous, partly-non-human audience is partly the work of figuring out which literacies will hold and which will be obsolete inside eighteen months. Furthermore, how do you meaningfully communicate with others, as the means to do so and barriers remain in flux?

Addendum on this year’s flash-trend of students booing graduation speakers who are celebrating AI

This pressure is not staying contained inside the small world of writers and prose stylists. The class of 2026 has been booing commencement speakers every time they mention AI. Gloria Caulfield got booed at the University of Central Florida for calling AI “the next industrial revolution.” Scott Borchetta got booed at Middle Tennessee State for telling graduates, “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.” Eric Schmidt got it the worst, drawing sustained boos at the University of Arizona to the point where he paused to say “I can hear you” mid-speech. Glendale Community College’s president drew boos just for explaining that an AI system was reading graduates’ names from the stage, partly because the system had been getting the names wrong.

Some of this is generational6 defiance, and that is part of it. Underneath, though, the graduates are reasoning about the same pressure the writers are, from the opposite end of the production relation. The writer adding typos is trying to stay legible as a human inside an audience that now contains non-human producers. The graduate being told to welcome the category of producer currently competing with them for the meaningfulness of their own labor is registering that this is not a welcome at all. Mistaken for the system in one case; replaced by it in the other. Same underlying shift in who and what the audience now contains.

Mark Twain’s worry about being damned to posterity by a foolish smile is, in this light, an old version of the worry Sarah Suzuki Harvard names when she calls the contemporary version “icky.” Both are reasoning, in the available vocabulary of their moment, about an audience whose composition they can only partly see, and about how to compose oneself for that audience without losing whatever it is about being a person the audience is supposed to be receiving.

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Closing “Two-Tracks” Thought: It is worth wondering how different communities will emerge, with both conventions and infrastructures to center the meaning and conversations they aspire to see more of in the world.

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Appendix: A short reading list for the long arc

For anyone wanting to follow the thread further, these cluster into a few literatures that rarely get put in the same room, which is part of why the arc is hard to see at once.

On the photographic subject and the gaze. Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) is the foundational treatment of the photograph as object, the photographer’s relationship to subject, and the strange new relation people now have to their own image across time. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and About Looking (1980), the latter containing “Uses of Photography,” are written partly in response to Sontag. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980) is on the photograph and the looked-at self; the source of the punctum concept. Tamara Berghmans and Ingrid Leonard’s Early Gaze: Unseen Photography of the 19th Century (FOMU, Antwerp, 2025) is a recent curatorial treatment of the awareness arc in early photography.

On performance, audience, and self-presentation. Goffman’s Presentation of Self (linked above) predates social media by decades but reads now as eerily prescient. Marwick and boyd’s 2011 paper (linked above) is the canonical work on context collapse; boyd’s blog post on the term’s origins is useful supplementary context. Michael Wesch’s 2008 lecture and 2009 paper are the cleanest contemporaneous account of the early-webcam audience problem. Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen (1995) and Alone Together (2011) trace the longer history of identity-formation through screens.

Additionally, Amanda Nicole Curtis raised many insightful points when drafting this piece, including mentioning these names for the Appendix:

Haidy Geismar’s work offers us a theory of ‘object lessons’ building on work by Lorraine Daston:​ ‘Object lessons are… both ontological (they tell us something about what there is) and epistemological (they help us interpret and explain what there is)’. Geismar reminds us that:​ ‘As much as digital media brings new ways of looking at and understanding collections, it also represents, and refracts, earlier representational techniques’​

On the camera as theoretical problem. Chronique d’un été (Rouch and Morin, 1961) is the film itself as argument; cinéma vérité as a posture lives or dies on whether the camera’s presence is honest material rather than perturbation to be hidden. Stella Bruzzi’s New Documentary (2nd ed., 2006) tracks the subject-aware-of-camera question through the late twentieth century.

On the democratization of the camera. Marc Olivier’s “George Eastman’s Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie” (Technology and Culture 48(1): 1–19, 2007) on the 1900 Brownie and the move of photography into ordinary hands.

On the webcam and early YouTube period. The POV Magazine retrospective on JenniCam, Petra Cortright, Natalie Bookchin, and others is a useful entry point. An Exhaustive (But Incomplete) History of the Webcam on Highsnobiety is broader-strokes but covers the cultural arc well.

On the WSJ piece itself and the present moment. Te-Ping Chen’s original Wall Street Journal piece. Andy O’Bryan’s response. O’Bryan’s framing of the moment as existential as well as stylistic is the right reading of what is happening underneath the typo-planting.

The arc is not a single literature, and no one of these texts captures the whole thing. The most interesting work is going to happen in the room where they are read together, which is mostly not yet a room that exists.

But there are many working to build that room, and the associated literacies. If you know folks or recommend any related resources, please leave a comment below or reach out.

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There’s a type of intellectual recycling I see happening a lot lately—especially in spaces that endeavor to be “future-facing.” It’s the re-use of outdated clout, the repackaging of old status systems, and the subtle assumption that we can build a new world using blueprints designed for a very different one.

My hot take? This isn’t rigor.
It just feels like rigor—because it’s familiar. It’s structured. It has a paper trail. But it’s not truly forward-thinking. It just appears easy.

And easy is what got us here.

Let me be clear: understanding the past is indispensable. We need to reckon with

the history of power, clout, and exclusion—especially in tech, academia, and politics. But that reckoning cannot be the final act. If we stop there, we’re not building a bridge to somewhere. We’re just polishing the ruins.

Perfect recitation of scriptures is not the same as participating in the journey to somewhere new

True innovation means juxtaposing our understanding of what has been with a bold vision of what could be—especially when it centers the people, insights, and values that legacy systems have overlooked or silenced1.

I’m not interested in being a gadfly or critic as my main role, but this post is essentially public therapy about something I am repeatedly exposed to on various fronts. When I see respected institutions and leaders still clinging to the same playbooks—while claiming to “lead the future”—it’s hard to stay quiet.

So, here’s the question that keeps gnawing at me:

Why do we keep needing to re-learn the same lessons from 40, 60, 100, 200+ years ago?

Some people shrug and say: “That’s just human nature.”
But I don’t buy it. I think we’ve not risen to the challenge, culturally and strategically, to cultivate better options—to show that something else is possible2.

Too many people haven’t seen a viable alternative to the status quo.
Worse, they don’t even know why those alternatives haven’t emerged.

This isn’t just a leadership problem. It’s a design problem.
And it’s one worth solving.

Because building a future worth living in isn’t about being clever with yesterday’s clout. It’s about being courageous with today’s possibilities.

As always, views are my own.
Jes - Boston, September 2025

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Background & Problem Space

I spend a lot of time in spaces where folks are talking about the future, and one thing that is coming up more and more, subtly but increasingly overtly, is about how people in leadership positions or acting as providers of vision and direction are having to:

1. pivot,

2. capitulate,

3. reverse course,

4. change their minds,

5. express or mitigate despair,

6. wade through uncertainty,

or any number of adjacent, in-between, or otherwise non-ideal ways of presenting oneself as a confident individual about the future.

The appearance of superlative amounts of confidence during this era generally cluster within these categories:

1. Single-dimension targeting*

2. Morally and intellectually dishonest or disingenuous extremes

3. Nihilism & apathy outright

This is to say: focusing only on one goal or solution at the expense of taking in a broader view; creating an heavily polarized Good or Evil view of self or others, or associate solutions or approaches; or broadly giving up and seeing it all as pointless. These are the areas where most folks right now (maybe in general, but I’m really talking about 2025, here, and now), are displaying extremely cavalier attitudes and undaunted or unflinching takes on things.

Alternatives We Can Enact

What I want to say in this piece is that the following is also a path one can walk:

1. You can be uncertain, frustrated, apathetic

2. Coalitions and spaces and community can still exist

3. But it may require context, courage, and choosing it to be so.

I don’t think the United States, in particular, has many models, examples, or legitimate heroes for how to handle situations like this that are not diluted, white-washed, or otherwise sterilized. I can mention a number of folks in the 1960s, but I fear I may loose attention in doing so.

What I want to focus on directly is challenging because none of the historical examples we may think of have dealt with the kind of change we are seeing right now; the waves we have to navigate are different.

So I want to speak to a small but important component to that process, which is:

Be prepared to allow for others to go through their vision, future, or worldview existential crisis as you collaborate and find ways of enduring and building with them.

Let’s unpack this briefly, while you’ve generously offered your attention — this is one of the most challenging things to actually look in the face in this moment that we’re in, and I appreciate you giving me the time to talk about this with you.

I am intentionally not attempting to label or prescribe a specific outcome, belief, or judgement here. I am instead trying to speak to a process of understanding what is going on, and offering a small bit of advice about how to best handle it.

As I noted above, this is a time where many of the folks we look up to, and the visions or solutions the have espoused, are undergoing varying degrees of change, uncertainty, instability, or potentially collapse.

It is natural and understandable to both look for our heroes, leaders, or figures to be confident and strong and offer a solution. But I am offering that we may:

1. reasonably guard against, and prepare for, the compulsion to seek security in those appearances,

2. as well as understand there are alternatives

That is, alternatives to abandoning our loftier beliefs or faith-in-humanity (or community in general), in by taking respite in a a more apparent stability, or more apparent “confidence.”

In other words, I am seeking to encourage and normalize that, in reality, the wisest, strongest, most viable, and most secure approach to this moment will actually warrant some pause, some reconsideration.

It may entail embracing some of the “I don’t know” of it all, and still putting forth meaning and fostering relationships in spite of not knowing.

Furthermore, it will be useful (maybe necessary) to accompany others as they transition through the stages of belief change, vision change, or reconsidering what to actually do right now.

About those with very clear, isolated goals

I think it is noteworthy to say, if there is a group, or a figure, that is clear about what they want to take away from this moment, it may also lend to the appearance of confidence; the old adage of “the best way to predict the future is to make it.” It is reasonable and probably wise to consider that there are factions attempting to pursue very specific targets right now (* Point 1 on single-targets, earlier) - but this can be differentiated from those who actually have a clear and holistic picture about what is going on right now.

As an old political science professor used to say, “The hardest time to understand is the one we are currently in.” To expand upon that, looking backwards you, you can see which of the potential pathways became more viable or eventually materialized - but history can seem linear and uncomplicated if there is not proper contextualizing for all the different ways things could have gone.

Implementation: What do we do?

So beyond identifying what may be happening, my suggestion and prescriptive stance is as follows.

Internal Work

Finding peace in times of uncertainty may sound unserious, but there are meaningful and sober ways to do so. There is such a strong ebb and flow to 2025, almost everyone I know is pulled and pushed with the waves and tides. I even have sympathy for the Influencers who are simply repeating their sales pitch and the virtues of their product or program in spite of these challenges; I’m now in that space increasingly, myself.

Whatever face people are putting on right now, even if they are front-running or band-wagoning on whatever appears to be the Winning Team (in their view), people are scared and uncertain. So what do we do about it, at the internal level?

• Find what regulates you, both individually and with others. What are your consumption limits and quotas? What are you doing that is away from all of the chaos and stress? What are your indulgence, your downtime — the carefree space we need to recharge? What about your constructive outlets or things to invest in?

These are suggestions, but you will need to invest in knowing yourself well enough to have a reasonable barometer of what kinds of stress and burnout you are accumulating, and how to care for it.

Even though the focus on this post is interpersonal, it seems critical to emphasize the internal work. The world is fierce and demanding, and you’ll have to tend to yourself first before others - just like on the airplane safety videos.

External Work: Accompanying the Variable Beliefs and Visions of Others

Community will be critical in this area, and whether you are simply looking to join one or tasked with managing and caring for others, this will come up.

Some people have been in the game for a long time and staring at these problems for decades. Some folks only now are understanding what “AI is about”, or dealing with what politics has showed itself as capable of doing.

What I want to offer is that, collectively, we are all in the same boat. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows what is going on or what is going to happen, and “that’s ok” — which I say not to normalize it or dismiss it, but rather to say we are in a period of that much change. I am also not suggesting everyone is simply going to get along, with a little compassion and understanding.

My message here is more so that the times are different, and it would be wise to consider carefully the trajectory of someone’s background, belief transitions, worldviews, and sense of the future.

We are going to need to collaborate, forge coalitions, alliances, and new ways of working together. Surely, there will be challenges and incompatibilities and lack of alignment at hand. But as we find new ways of doing things ahead, it is viable to understand how our changing times can mask or distort potential allies.

Or, how people simply dealing with the world as it is, will have varying degrees of contribution and availability as you attempt to forge your own way ahead, reconsider or solidify your own beliefs, and your particular plan going forward.

The new name of the game is a kind of extended, distributed co-regulatory path-finding practice. Alongside some valued colleagues and collaborators, I am attempting to discern, demarcate, and otherwise write more about this, as I find it to be a critical matter and even skillset that is substantially underrepresented.

We are not prepared for this moment in most of our formally available training. But there are things to know and learn and do, and ways to support and grow and cultivate that which we will require to sustain, endure, and flourish in the months and years ahead.

At the very least, there are better and worse ways of handling all of this, and there are those of us working to sort out what they are. If you are working in this space, or want to be doing more in this space, and resonate with this message, please reach out.

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Recommended Reading

I don’t truly know a book I’d recommend about this, given the lack of actual context for the influence of AI (and its impact on surveillance, information distortion or control, and the unknown and to-be-built digital ways of relating to each other), and the general World War era political pressures — both. (No less other factors, which I will unironically bypass for brevity here.)

But I would suggest looking into:

• Those who are Steel Manning a particular view and its trajectory, so as to demarcate where things may go if that line of reasoning holds out. (Recall “The hardest time to understand is the one we’re in”, from earlier.) Due to the innumerable approaches, visions, and agendas at hand, those who identify clearly where one of them is going can be of great use to your own triangulations and extrapolations.

• Quality takes on emotional literacy, and perhaps even things like faith transitions, or people moving in and out of cults.

  • I don’t mean to sound hokey or histrionic, but, we are indeed in a period where people’s views are fought for, no less the Attention Era in general. Also, one of my most respected in-the-thick-of-it people in the building of AI has commented about the nature of Silicon Valley and tech startup spaces as similar to the Axial Age or Late Antiquity, where the vying for believers and quest for dominance of alignment or devotion to a vision.

• Good literature about finding meaning or leadership or forging community in ties of uncertainty. Particularly if it goes beyond “uncertain markets”, but actual macro-level uncertainties.

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What would you suggest?

For more updates,
Jes Parent: Substack, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter/X, YouTube
JOPRO - Substack, LinkedIn, Bluesky
From Here To There: Substack, LinkedIn

Of all the uncertainty taking place here in 2025, I continue to find respite and solidarity in the builders.

Similar to Mr. Rogers "look for the helpers" in times of disarray or crisis, there are folks earnestly doing the work of building things that matter, looking at the difficult problems, and trying whole-heartedly to learn and grow and find new and better ways ahead; to actually understand how the world has come to be made - and looking for meaningful alternatives.

They are often not headlines, or the loudest voices in the room. But they exist, and we are finding ways to connect, collaborate, endure, survive, move through the murky waters and maneuver around the obstacles.

It's part of why I am developing JOPRO, and part of why I am doing a lot of work to connect to various communities of builders, thinkers, healers, and otherwise those looking at what is going on with as clear eyes as possible and getting to the real work.

It’s about the folks drawn to circles of practice that combine strategy, complexity, and care. We may not have perfect answers, but we are asking better questions, together.

The real work will remain, out there, to be done, regardless of all of the distractions and mounting consequences that we all are collectively having to deal with — right now, and probably throughout the rest of this century ahead. We are in a critical time for history, and we are still learning how to “grow” and have “progress” beyond duplicating what worked from 1900-2000:

The future will not suffer regurgitated methods and approaches, but only return to us the exhaust, exploitations, and familiar disparities of the previous millennium (or rather, millennia.) We have to meet the moment, and resist the allure of convenience in our aims, efforts, and methods.

Furthermore, we don't get the luxury of abstracting things out into a sterile setting: we have to connect where the present is — and understand its inertia and trajectory — to where things can go, and try to make the best choices about what and how to get there.

There is a lot to do, and to build, and yet to be comprehended, no less to be understood. Problematic influences will profit from apathy and despair. I don't have any sense of an immediately tenable utopia, but if there is one thing that I am sure of, is that in spite of the Doom Scroll-worthy news and realities, there are still those showing up and stacking the days and conversations and projects and ideas, to make something of substance.

There are alternatives to select from, choices to be made, and things to do in this world - and they matter.

Jesse
June 2025
Boston

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If this resonates with you, let’s connect, either for community or collaborations. I’m putting a lot of effort in aligning opportunity with those who want to do the work, so if we can help each other build, share hope, sustain and endure, or otherwise pursue what this is, reach out.

For more updates,
Jes Parent: Substack, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter/X, YouTube
JOPRO - Substack, LinkedIn, Bluesky
From Here To There: Substack, LinkedIn