**********
Thank you for writing, and thanks for thinking of me with regards to your proposal review.
As we have discussed previously, from the Dynamicland perspective, much of the current work and discussion surrounding digital tools for an informed society can be seen as mostly palliative. It can inspire feelings of urgency and excitement, but is likely to have a short shelf-life, because the underlying platforms are rotten. A genuinely informed and wise society cannot be built upon people poking at apps on corporate-controlled screens. Building yet more apps will only exacerbate the problem.
I wrote this to you earlier:
--- ---
We think that the goals of Dynamicland are extremely aligned with ***'s mission. We are, very literally, trying to invent:
- the future of reading and writing
- the future of the book, newspaper, and library
- the future town hall, and perhaps even congress
Dynamicland is a prototype of a new medium for people to understand, explore, and discuss the issues and systems that affect our world.
Civic engagement is central. From the beginning, we envision Dynamicland as an event venue where people use our "communication tools of the future" to present and explore issues critical to their community. As our technology becomes widespread, it will "level up" all people's ability to explore complex issues and have informed debate.
Bret spent many years doing pioneering work in digital storytelling (including inventing
Explorable Explanations, designing
Our Choice with Al Gore, lecturing with Edward Tufte), and he ended up concluding that
significant change is impossible with computers as we know them.
Laptops and smartphones produce Facebook-thinking, inescapably.
To go beyond a Facebook-world, we need a new medium, constructed from the bottom up around individual agency and empowerment, heterogeneity and decentralization, and people actually talking to one another face-to-face and learning from one another. We are the only effort we know of to deliberately build such a medium.
--- ---
By now, we're more than simply an "effort". Despite the adverse funding situation, under which it was miraculous anything happened at all, Dynamicland exists and works and has served hundreds of people. We saw genuine data-driven "dynamic conversations", "dynamic presentations", and dynamic authoring both casual and serious. We had artists, students, teachers, scientists doing real legitimate work in Dynamicland. We had workshops where non-programmers were making and sharing their own dynamic media within an hour. We saw people casually and continuously riffing on and extending each other's ideas in a way that is unprecedented in computing.
Dynamicland received no funding from the ****** Foundation, nor from any other foundation. We did, however, receive a lot of interest from corporations and VCs, to "productize" the work -- that is, to allow it to contribute to the disempowering corporate-driven computing landscape and extend the apparatus of surveillance and control. Because I refused these offers, we were left with basically nothing. ************************
One of the primary drivers of the current social/political situation that concerns ****** is the dominance of corporate-driven computing platforms. My story can be seen as a demonstration, in microcosm, of how one of the primary reasons for that dominance is that the foundations won't step up and support fundamental invention in the public interest. Instead, they put themselves in the position of extinguishing fires after they've already grown out of control.
The Dynamicland vision will exist, eventually, because I've committed my life to it. Without support, it will take a long time. In the meantime, the problems that concern ****** will only grow more dire, because all attempts to address them using digital tools will be subverted by the tools themselves.
************************