Nobody Asked You

Earlier this month, I took part in an event at the European Parliament. Titled ‘A Progressive European Future’, it brought together Brussels’ leading lights - MEPs, lawyers, activists, journalists and academics - to wrestle with what I believe is the biggest question of our time: how do we craft and communicate a believable and inspiring vision for the future?

We spoke for over three hours. Spain’s Prime Minister addressed the room. Bernie Sanders dialled in. And I left no clearer about what that vision was.

This is not a criticism of the people who took part. They are smart, engaging thinkers taking seriously the task of filling the vision gap that bedevils politics all over the world. There was a lot of serious analysis: graphs showing the yawning inequalities, speeches passionately defending laws put in place to protect Europeans, questions over how to listen better, to communicate more, how to respond to the climate crisis, or handle Big Tech.

But none of that is vision. No one painted a picture of how things might look if we’d actually built the world we want.

The Vision Gap - And Why It Matters

Without that picture, a better future will remain out of reach. The polycrisis - the combined impacts of inequality, climate change, political dysfunction and cultural breakdown - is crying out for a big, bold inspiring response that shows us how the world might be different and better, and invites us into making it happen. So where is it?

It’s not coming from the vast majority of progressive political leaders, who have broadly retreated into a defensive crouch in the face of the populist right – thereby allowing themselves to be cast as defenders of a broken status quo. It’s not coming from progressive activists, who too often busy themselves playing whack-a-mole – responding to the latest crisis without giving a clear sense of how that work creates a better future. And it’s certainly not coming from the centre-left, who seem convinced that eventually things will ‘go back to normal’, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

We’re facing a vision gap - and the result is a crisis of despair. The problems keep piling up. The summers get hotter, the world less secure, the gap between the super rich and the rest of us bigger. No-one is telling us how the future might be better.

Well, almost no one.

Silicon Dreaming

Big Tech has many problems, but a lack of vision is not one of them. In Silicon Valley, the future is just another problem to be ‘solved’. The grotesque inequalities of today are a price worth paying for the promise of tomorrow - a world where everything is automated, AI has created unprecedented abundance, and humanity lives in a post-work utopia. Sure, there’s a chance the super-intelligent machines that have made this possible might kill us all. But it’s worth the gamble. Right?

Even if this were a desirable future, it is not what Silicon Valley is creating. Scratch beneath the bombast, and it seems clear that we are heading towards a future where a new critical resource, computing power, is controlled by two superpowers, the US and China. As AI and tech sucks in increasingly large parts of the economy, the entire world risks reliance on a handful of companies in two countries to function. The power and wealth this will create will be astronomical. But the promise of sharing this abundance is, on current trends, laughable.

We’re more likely to see a supercharging of inequality, driven by a massive wave of unemployment as human workers are replaced by ever more capable AI agents. Even if Big Tech wants to share the wealth they accumulate – short of a massive global corporation tax, which tech companies do everything to avoid, there’s not really a proven mechanism to do so. Put another way, the techno-utopian vision of the future, where AI solves all our problems and ushers in an age of plenty for all, is – for want of a better term – bullshit.

Story Machines

Despite this, many smart and thoughtful people choose to believe in the Silicon Valley vision of the future. This is because human beings are biologically attuned to story, and vision is a story, and just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans abhor a story vacuum. Story moves through us and between us like breath, taken in, transformed, shared back with the world. And in the face of a vision gap, we’ll fill the vacuum with any big story that contains transformational magic, epic drama, and the promise of becoming something greater.

The Silicon Valley vision appeals for the same reason that the Greek myth of Prometheus appeals. There’s the same boldness and daring in creating super-intelligence as there is in stealing fire from the Gods. It calls us into something bigger. Something new. Something that changes everything. You don’t have to believe it to see that it is much more compelling than the thin gruel of ‘let’s make the status quo work a bit better’ stories we get from mainstream politicians.

But is this trickle-down technoutopianism the best story we can tell for this time? Put aside whether it will ever come true (something I very much doubt), do we really think the best future we can make for the world will be spawned from the fever dreams of awkward billionaire coders in Silicon Valley?

I don’t. We need something else.

The Most Important Question You’ve Never Been Asked

When was the last time you were asked what our collective future could look like?

Take a couple of minutes and sit with that question. It’s bigger than it seems. Think of all the ways we seek agency in our lives, all the things we do to control the future. Think of the huge impact the sort of societies and cultures we live in have on our experience. Think about the children in your life, and the world they will inherit. And wonder at the fact that nobody asked you.

The truth is that for many of us, we’re too busy dealing with the consequences of what is to create space for the promise of what might be. It feels almost indulgent, disconnected from the here and now. This excellent article from Dark Matter Labs, about how the Swedish city of Lund is coordinating action to meet its climate goals, says: “visioning without execution is just expensive dreaming.”

But the trouble is that it works both ways. Execution without vision is just expensive action. To craft a better future from the troubled time we live in, we need vision and execution to dance together. We need to dream and do. There’s no short of doing in the world. But where’s the dreaming? By asking the question we never get asked, I think we might have a shot at finding both a vision, and how we get there.

The World We Want

This is why I’m proud of my work with Avaaz. Our mission has always been to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people want. It’s about practical action rooted in our dreams. And this summer, we are trying something radical to close the vision gap - launching a global listening exercise aimed at crowdsourcing visions for the future from people everywhere, synthesising them into a powerful narrative, and sharing it with the world.

Avaaz members will be at the centre of this project. We’ll be running workshops around the world to facilitate in-depth conversations aimed at surfacing both the desires and the hard choices needed to make them real. Then we’ll take the output to the wider Avaaz membership to get more input and fine-tune the vision. My hope is that hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people will take part, producing a multi-layered picture of what a future of true thriving looks like for people and planet.

Together, we’ll write an epic story of tomorrow, one big enough to hold us all.

I know what you might be thinking: an epic story isn’t written by a committee of millions. And you’re right. If this is just a giant feedback form, it will fail. But our goal isn’t to build a bland checklist of demands; it’s to uncover the shared human values and deep-seated desires that Big Tech and mainstream politicians are ignoring, and synthesise them into a roaring counter-narrative that can guide and power our work, and I hope, inspire people everywhere.

As far as I know, this has never been done before on a global scale. It’s a massive undertaking, but we’re starting small and learning as we go, building the boat as we sail it. I can’t tell you how excited I am about it.

Please consider this an invite to take part. The first workshops will be starting soon - but if you want to get involved as this project progresses, please let us know here. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this — and your hopes and dreams for the future — in the comments below. What would the world you dream of leaving to your children look like?