I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?
-Mark Zuckerberg
In a manifesto posted last Thursday, the youthful founder of Facebook asked the question “are we building the world we all want? “ that closely echoes the conversation starter I posted here myself just two weeks ago. I’m pretty certain though, that publication of his 5,000 word manifesto so close on the heels of my challenge was pure coincidence. Or it could be the “zeitgeist” that I tried to name shortly after the Trump triumph (that you can read HERE).
In an upside down world where we can’t seem to rely anymore on what we know to be true, proven science is questioned more vehemently than fake-news, we’re finding it necessary to lay out some guidelines for how we’d like to see this drama play out in the end. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg did in calling for “bringing us closer together and building a global community” that is “supportive…safe…informed…civically-engaged…inclusive”.
Who in the world today has greater levers at his disposable to ensure that such a community centric world actually comes to be? To his credit, he doesn’t claim to have all the answers. “There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.” He understands that it is more complex than designing a new Facebook feature, or an algorithm for fake-news filtering: “We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately”, and that he can’t do it alone: “…but we can all start working on the long term today.”
In the end, he recognizes that creating the world we would love to live in is a grand project that must involve everyone, working with common purpose and the best of intentions: “There are many of us who stand for bringing people together and connecting the world. I hope we have the focus to take the long view and build the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.”
Emboldened by this celebrity endorsement of my conversations project, I published my first piece to the publishing platform Medium. I conclude it thus:
“Help me start a design conversation about the world we’d love to live in by sharing this article with anyone you know who has a vision or an opinion about the kind of world they’d like to live in”.
I want to talk with visionaries and makers who have their own ideas about the world we can create together. If you find this idea as compelling as Mark Zuckerberg apparently did, let me know, join me, pass the Medium article along, “like” it, share it, recommend it, so it’ll get seen by as many people as possible and maybe we can get this conversation going.
