After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory (My Next Book)

I’m excited to share that last weekend I signed the contract for my next book with University of Michigan Press. Over the course of the next year I will be developing After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. In this post I share an overview plan for the book and I’ll be sharing drafts of it as I go. I’m looking forward to any comments or recommendations you might have about how I’m approaching this.

As I finished my last book, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the broader set of issues facing cultural memory institutions. The last chapter of The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation shifts into thinking about the future and the wide range of challenges that the Anthropocene presents to preservation and this book will largely work as a further zooming out on some of those issues. To that end, this book also builds from some of what I was exploring in the Stone Lecture I gave earlier this year. Along with that, I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges that the grad students in my digital history and libraries and archives classes face as they work to break into the field. So the book is also an attempt to think through and synthesize a lot of issues that have surfaced in my teaching.

I am happy to share that the press is onboard with me sharing drafts of what I write here on my blog for feedback and review as I develop the manuscript. So I’m currently thinking that I will likely have a draft of the first half of the book together to share with you all at some point in the spring and then a draft of the second half of the book to share in the summer. I have already gotten a lot of helpful and thoughtful feedback from my editor, Sara Jo Cohen, and the reviewers and others at the press on the proposal and first two chapters I submitted with the proposal. I’m planning to use the blog as a place to expand that circle to others who are interested in following along on the project and offering any feedback.

In the interest of continuing to invite discussion and input about what I’m starting to put together, I’m also sharing the text of the book proposal here too. Based on feedback I’ve received, I already know a few things that are going to be tweaked and changed as the full book comes together, but I figured it made sense to share the proposal text more or less as is for input while I’m thinking through things too.

Overview of the Book

The digital age is burning out our most precious resources. Among other things the future of the past is at stake. Ted Talk style rhetoric about tech innovation and unending growth are partly responsible for the era of social, economic, cultural, and ecological calamities we are now facing. Our institutions of cultural memory, libraries, archives, museums, humanities departments and research institutes, have been disrupted, and largely not for the better.

As the tech sector and social media took center stage in cultures of management and management consulting in the 90s and 00s their ideology became a driving force in civic, social, and cultural institutions. University deans talk of disruptive innovation. Library directors track key performance indicators on data analytics dashboards. Historians stress the importance of scholars developing their personal brands on Twitter. Along with access to millions of digitized books and an abundance of forms of digital scholarship we find ourselves in memory institutions with increasingly precarious labor, mounting financial challenges that threaten their survival, and among the public, a loss of trust in expert analysis of the historical record. All the while, we continue to be told to be vigilant for the ways that digital technology will still yet disrupt our organizations futures.

I am describing things that have already happened, which prompts a question: What comes after disruption? Tech ideology demands perpetual anxiety about the coming disruption. My question to cultural heritage institution leaders and workers is instead, what should we do now, after disruption? How do we make sense of both the good and the bad that has come from our tech sector disrupted memory institutions? We are no longer planning for a digital future but living in a digital present. In that context, how do we plan for and develop a more just, sustainable, and healthy future for cultural memory? Over the next century, as sea levels and temperatures rise, we will see a widespread breakdown of norms and assumptions that have driven society over the previous century. At the same time, we have seen income inequality and increased precarity for workers in nearly all fields. Given that, what is the future of cultural memory in the face of a breakdown in our shared assumptions about both memory and the future? These are exactly the questions which After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory sets out to answer. 

Facile, naïve, and problematic, start-up ideology came bundled with digital technologies. It’s essential to name and trace those ideas and their effects. The first half of the book draws on critical scholarship on the history of technology and business to document and expose the sources of these ideologies and their pernicious results.  Specifically, an obsession with disruptive innovation, an insistence on the importance of “the hustle” and personal brands, and faith in “money-ball” style analytics and data have done extensive harm. I’ve slowly come to see how these, often at first compelling sounding ideas, play out and the havoc they bring to those of us working for the future of memory institutions.

It’s not enough to identify problematic ideologies. We need powerful and compelling counter frameworks and values to replace them. Drawing on work in science and technology studies, intersectional feminist theory, and educational philosophy, the second half of the book offers maintenance, care, and repair as three intertwined notions to moor the future of memory work and memory institutions. We need to invest in maintenance of our memory infrastructure. We need to create physical, digital, and social infrastructure that supports networks of care for memory workers, collections, communities, and the environment. We need to commit to repair and remodel our institutions to cut out patriarchy, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and manifest destiny and replace them with allyship, centering the voices and needs of the vulnerable, marginalized and oppressed. The book concludes with discussion of the realities of working to enact and live these values as a memory worker, a manager in a cultural heritage institution, and an educator of historians, librarians, and archivists.

The book will appeal broadly to those interested in the future of humanities and memory institutions and their relationships to technology. It relates directly to and builds on a wide range of recent scholarship. As a critique and practical call to action it pairs well with and would appeal to a similarly broad audience as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. It builds on and draws from recent work on the centrality of maintenance, like Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russel’s The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. It similarly builds on and draws from work the on problems with metrics in organizations, like Jerry Z. Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics. As a critique of/resistance to tech sector thinking it draws from and relates to books like Jenny Odell’s, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking. It connects with current discussions about the importance of care in society and organizations, like the Care Collective’s Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence.

While anchored in relevant scholarship and context, the book is also intended to be accessible and engaging to a broad audience of scholars, administrators, librarians, archivists, and museum professionals. It will also be a valuable resource as a textbook for graduate humanities seminars and courses in library and information science programs on organizational planning and management.

Chapter One: A Future for Cultural Memory

The future of our past is dependent on the future of cultural memory institutions and their workers. The challenge of the Anthropocene has brought into question core assumptions of our imagined future. Simultaneously, digital storage technologies have changed how we conceptualize memory itself. As a starting point for the book, this chapter is focused on clarifying what is at stake for both notions of the future and memory in the wake of the disruption that the tech sector has brought about in the last half century. 

In philosopher Franco Berardi’s terms, we find ourselves living and working “after the future.” In hindsight, somewhere around the great recession of 2008, faith in technology’s potential for progress dimmed. While Google still tells us it exists to organize the world’s knowledge, there is increasing skepticism about the kinds of algorithmic biases they promote. At the same time, faith in the creative freedom provided by knowledge work careers lost out to the growth of precarity in the “gig economy.” Memory institutions are increasingly offering temporary jobs to individuals increasingly carrying more and more student debt.

All the while the effects of anthropogenic climate change are making themselves known. In Roy Scranton’s terms, it is time for societies to begin considering how to die in the Anthropocene. Humanity is likely to survive beyond the 21st and 22nd centuries, but it will come out the other side of the centuries with its civilizations and institutions transformed. What should the purpose of memory work and memory institutions be in civilizations facing extinction? As archivist Sam Win argues, it is now important to think about palliative practice for cultural and social memory. In short, our assumptions about perpetual growth and progress in imagining the future need to change.

Alongside changing ideas about the future, the development of digital media has changed how we conceptualize memory itself. As media scholar Wendy Chun argues, memory has been hardened into storage. We are awash in documentation and recordings of the world and life and faced with ever larger quantities of information and data to consider collecting. As a result of computing, memory is now a tangible object, data encoded in a medium. We need to second guess the technical assumptions about memory as storage, or memory as data. It is critical to return to ideas of social and cultural memory as a lived part of identity, belonging, and community. When we take a more expansive notion of “living memory” we also find ways to better imagine a future for our shared cultural memory.

With notions of both the future and memory unpacked and articulated, the chapter ends with a roadmap for the book. What follows is an excavation of the recent past to document the emergence of three bankrupt ideologies that created the disrupted present: disruptive innovation, data analytics, and personal brands. After picking apart the pernicious nature of these sets of ideas the book transitions to elaborate on the way that maintenance, care and repair can become a new foundation to enact a more sustainable, equitable, and just future for cultural memory.

Chapter Two: What Disruption Wants

Fail faster. Creative destruction. Disruptive innovation. Hackathons. Asking, in almost any meeting, “but will it scale?” Over the last three decades the language of Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capitalists has found a home in the strategic plans and mission and vision statements of higher education and cultural memory institutions. This vocabulary, which historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell have named “innovation-speak,” is now a core part of management cultures across the U.S. and beyond. This chapter is an exploration of the history of these ideas and the mixed results of their spread into institutions of cultural memory.

In retrospect, the last broad-based positive vision of a future for our world, and our memory along with it, came at the end of the 20th century. Philosopher Franco Berardi calls it “the Wired imagination.” Wired magazine popularized and sold a us a vision of a world where we would become netizens and independent creative professionals continually revolutionizing and democratizing how people and cultures tell their stories and connect with each other through the medium of the open web.  In this context notions that “information wants to be free” and the open-source software movement emerged. Those movements wove their ways into the academy in the emergence of digital history, digital preservation, digital scholarship, and the digital humanities. I experienced them firsthand working as the first and only “technology evangelist” hired on at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

While innovation-speak is wrapped in the rhetoric of revolution and freedom, those are not the source of its ideological success. The subtitle to Chirstianson’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, is telling in this regard. The heart of innovation-speak is not working toward a better future, it is about the fear of being left behind. Of critical importance, chasing after novelty and the new has resulted in the creation a tiered society of work and workers, the maintainers and the innovators. The former are relegated to try and hold things together. The latter are provisioned resources to experiment, play and envision a future that is increasingly disassociated with the realities of the work and issues at hand.

The revolutionary rhetoric of innovation-speak is anything but. In practice, innovation-speak is a face for colonialism, white supremacy, and toxic masculinity. The gig economy isn’t a form of liberation. It’s sold in the language of freedom but it’s really the opposite. One of the most pernicious problems of innovation-speak is it lulls one into believing they are a force for change and good. Facebook can assert its mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But it is increasingly clear that big tech is not the noble force it purports to be. Instead, big tech is anchored in surveillance and control.

It’s long past time to leave behind novelty seeking and innovation-speak. Leaders in institutions of memory need to review and second guess the extent to which we have bought into an increasingly bankrupt vision for the future. We need to stop outsourcing envisioning the future to management consultants and the tech sector and instead return to the values and core missions of cultural heritage institutions.

Chapter Three: Data Analytics Myopia

In 2006, data scientist Clive Humby declared “Data is the new oil.” This bit of hype reoccurs every so often in headlines in Wired and The Economist. It offers a point of entry to understand the consultant classes ideology of data analytics. Data is out there waiting to be mined, extracted, processed and exploited. It is to be consumed to fuel perpetual growth. This chapter focuses on the way notions of data driven decision making, Key Performance Indicators, and Objectives and Key Results have resulted in reductionist and myopic perspectives for planning and envisioning the future of memory institutions. 

All sorts of organizations now have Chief Data Officers, often people who know data analysis techniques but aren’t themselves experts in the issues at hand for the organization’s missions. Of course, making decisions informed by evidence is a good thing, but when the quest for data and the desire to track it becomes central to all areas of work and planning it warps perspectives on what matters, and literally what counts. Historian Jerry Z. Muller describes the problems that emerge in this context as the tyranny of metrics, a situation where only things that can be easily counted and tracked are zeroed in on as targets and goals for growth.

Cultural memory institutions and workers now increasingly operate under this tyranny of metrics. Leaders in library organizations have sought “money ball” approaches to statistical analysis of their collections and collections use patterns. Federal agencies supporting advancement scholarship have been pushed to track reductive performance measures like citation counts. In each of these cases, chasing data creates a dichotomy between the analyst and the analyzed. The expert at their craft (librarians, archivists, historians, etc.) who can appreciate the full range of issues and challenges in each context are to be distrusted. On the ground expert judgement is dismissed as subjective instead of being understood as nuanced, contextualized and embedded.

As leaders from a wide range of institutions embrace books like Measure What Matters: OKRs – The Simple Idea that Drives 10x growth they celebrate the ascendance of individual key trackable metrics for growth. Of note, a central case study in this book is illustrative of the harm this perspective can bring. In 2011, YouTube decided to focus solely on aggregate watch time of videos as its metric. As one might suspect, when all you care about is getting people to watch a billion hours a day you don’t end up caring about what they watch. YouTube ended up meeting that target in large part because the best way to rack up those hours is by promulgating and building a broad audience for fringe conspiracy theories.

We are now two decades out from the critically acclaimed release of the television show The Wire, but it’s depiction of teachers, police officers, journalists, and civic leaders work to juke the stats and put spin on what does and doesn’t get counted could very well describe the functions and operations of our civic and cultural institutions today. We need to be thinking about how to undermine the false notions of objectivity in data and sort through how to turn back responsibilities to improving our world to the experts on the ground working in their fields.

Chapter Four: Solipsism and Personal Brands

In 2010, historians Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, invited scholars around the world to contribute to the open access book Hacking the Academy. One of the prompts in their call for participation was “Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?” At the time, at least for me, it felt like the answer might be yes. I had established a social media presence and found community and connection with a wide range of historians, digital humanities scholars, librarians, archivists and museum professionals. That network was far more important to me professionally than what I had found in the American Historical Association, the American Library Association, or the Society of American Archivists.

These sentiments about Twitter have not aged well. While Twitter provided a way to get your name out there and make connections it functions as part of a draining always on attention economy. The laissez-faire heart of technolibertarinaism that animates social media platforms also makes them places where women and people of color face near constant harassment. This chapter explores the effects of ideas about social media, personal brands and the entrepreneurial self on memory workers careers and the institutions that employ them.

The insistence that we cultivate our individual personal brands directly connects to a now multi-generational divestment in institutions and a push to treat every person as their own entrepreneurial self. As sociologist Annette Lareau noted in research in the early 1990s, middle class parents began shifting their focus to one of “concerted cultivation” of their children. Where children had once engaged in free play, nearly every activity from playing on the soccer team to going to violin lessons became part of building out one’s resume for college and their eventual future career. The cult of the hustle emerged and places more and more responsibility on individuals to invent and pitch themselves to stitch together careers through gig and freelance work. As social media emerged as a place to build a personal brand it also presented another way to raise the stakes on what it means to be a good worker.

Both Millennials and now Gen Z, have grown up in a culture that values work not only as a source of income but also as validation of self to be performed for friends and family on social media. A good job isn’t enough. As Anne Hellen Peterson argues, it’s now essential to have “a cool job.” Work in cultural memory; as librarians, archivists, curators, and historians, is “cool” enough that young people are willing to endure increasingly extreme hardships, racking up loans for graduate degrees, moving across the country for unpaid or low-pay contract positions, all for the chance at landing one of these “cool jobs.” Higher education and cultural memory institutions have engaged in a race to the bottom, with more and more rungs on ladders of low pay and unpaid work that make it increasingly likely that only those who come from money have a chance to take on roles in memory institutions. 

Cultural heritage institutions need to push back against the solipsism of the hustle and resist the accelerating trend to pay less and offer less security to those seekers of “cool jobs.” The result of all of this is an increasingly burned-out workforce which is less and less able to take care of themselves and less and less equipped or supported to be stewards of cultural memory.

Chapter Five: Centering Maintenance

In 1969, in the Maintenance Art Manifesto, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles identified a dichotomy between a death and life instinct in society. The death instinct focused on “separation, individuality, Avant-Gard par excellence; to follow one’s own path-do your own thing.” In contrast, the life instinct involved “unification, the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.” Ukeles vision of the death instinct could work as a synopsis of the last three chapters. I’ve become increasingly convinced that the themes around the life instinct, specifically with the focus on maintenance, are central to envisioning a better future for cultural memory. There is a robust body of research and scholarship on both the value of preventive maintenance and the value of investing in engineering more redundant and resilient infrastructure and systems. This chapter engages with this work and relates it to cultural memory.

Centering maintenance is critical to improving the function of our institutions in this era after disruption. Significantly, in legal scholar Jedediah Purdy’s terms, we also find ourselves living in a time “after nature.” In the Anthropocene, humanity has so deeply disrupted the cycles and ecosystems of the Earth that we need to not only be maintainers and sustainers of our social, economic, and cultural infrastructure but we also need to be committed to making the very ecosystems of the planet sustainable and maintainable in the face of human activity. 

We need to begin to center maintenance over innovation. Or alternatively, we need to reframe what it means to be innovative to envision more resilient systems, to focus on maintainability, in ways to support anti-growth. The ideological core of innovation-speak assumes never ending perpetual growth but within the context of a living entity unchecked growth is a cancer. It’s detrimental to the ability for survival.

We can shift our resources and our thinking away from novelty. We can shift our resources away from the analyst at a distance interpreting data out of context and instead work to empower and engage deeply in contexts of the work at hand. At the same time, we need to make sure that a focus on maintenance doesn’t become maintenance of the status quo.

Chapter Five: Starting from Care

We need to replace the individualism of innovation with the interdependence of care. In good news, in parallel with the development of innovation rhetoric, feminist scholarship has developed and advanced an ethics and politics better attuned to the world we find ourselves in. The politics and ethics of care. In philosopher Nel Noddings terms, to work from an ethic of care is to “always act so as to establish, maintain, or enhance caring relations” and “to meet the other as one-caring.” This involves striving to advance the ends of others on their terms. This chapter focuses on describing the ethics and politics of care and articulating what it would mean for cultural memory institutions start from care as the basis of their work.  

At its heart, a politics of care transposes the interdependence that exist in our individual relationships with each other as a basis for imagining social, political, and institutional structures and systems. As the Care Manifesto contends, “Only by multiplying our circles of care – in the first instance, by expanding our notion of kinship – will we achieve the psychic infrastructures necessary to build a caring society that has universal care as its ideal.” Much of the language of innovation exapts Darwinian survival of the fittest metaphors which have increasingly been dismissed as ways to understand biological environments. Ecosystems and evolution are now increasingly understood not in terms of struggle and dominance but in terms of symbiosis, and sympoiesis (making with). Processes of both intra and inter species collaboration and cooperation offer models to draw from for enacting this politics of care.

On some level we all understand we are dependent on each other. We are born incapable of taking care of ourselves. We grow old and are dependent on care. But in the middle, at some points, we imagine ourselves independent. Much of our psychological theory and our economic theory is based on the idea that individual people function as rational independent units. It’s worth underscoring that both psychological and economic theory is shifting to become more ecological in nature as well.

Notions of interdependence and care come with connections to longstanding notions of how organizations and businesses should function.  Robert Greenleaf’s vision for servant leadership was anchored in the idea that institutions and companies exist as much for their patrons and customers as they do to provide meaningful and fulfilling work for their employees.

In this context, care is valuable in helping us reinvent the very language of adaption and change. Discussions of maintenance still focus attention on masculine notions of construction, building, engineering and the built environment. In contrast, notions like care provide metaphors like “gardening” which offer ways to think about co-creation and ecological systems perspectives. A gardener is making-with, is engaging in activities of sympoiesis. Indeed, as we increasingly move into a world that exists “after nature,” it’s essential that we transition away from metaphors that position “makers” in contrast to “materials.” When we start from care we will set fundamentally different kinds of goals for fundamentally different kinds of results.

Chapter Seven: Remodeling, Renovation & Repair

In “Rethinking Repair,” information science scholar Stephen Jackson asks us to “take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media.” In contrast to notions of disruptive and destructive innovation, this line of thinking leads us to see the capacity of human civilization to absorb and respond to dramatic changes as the sites of genuine innovation. Through discussion of the ship-breaking industry in Bangladesh, Jackson demonstrates how a source of global waste and detritus of abandoned ships becomes a resource that is broken down to its parts and circulated back into the global economy. Along with maintenance and care, repair and related notions of renovation and remodeling provide valuable metaphors for thinking about how to sustain people and institutions throughout change.

As noted earlier, an issue with maintenance as a concept is that it can come with a reactionary connotation. It’s critical to develop an approach to maintenance that is not synonymous with “maintaining the status quo.” Pairing maintenance with care and repair is essential to support the major repair and remodeling necessary in our social, civic, and economic institutions. Toxic masculinity, white supremacy and settler colonialism are founding extractive central problems for memory work and memory institutions. As a result, there is rampant racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, queer-phobia and other forms of oppression that are endemic to memory work and institutions of cultural memory.

Make America Great Again masquerades as a narrative of restoration and repair. Of course, it’s not a return to union jobs and lower income inequality. The rise of Trump and the nostalgic reactionary agenda of MAGA is illustrative of real harm that can come from manipulations of cultural memory. Notions of “heritage” are central to fascism and the need to be directly confronted as the cancer that they are. The oppressive structural problems at the heart of memory institutions require remodeling. We need to fix and repair them. There is dismantling that needs to happen but it’s not fundamentally a destructive process. We need to treat and remove the cancers in our professions, institutions, and society and only then will we all be able to live in a healthier way. We don’t need “creative destruction.”

We don’t need “disruptive innovation.” The rhetoric of revolution in innovation-speak is, again, false. We need deliberate focused efforts to remodel and repair our institutions. We can make our institutions better versions of themselves that live up to the lofty values like equity and justice that were carved above many of their stone entry ways centuries ago. As artist Jenny Odell’s argues, we can engage in acts of manifest dismantling. As Odell notes, the intentional dismantling of the San Clemente Dam in California involved working to repair and re-cultivate ecosystems the dam had disrupted. The dam was implemented to control and dominate nature, and the answer wasn’t to blow it up, but to intentionally dismantle it and engage in work to repair the damage it had done. We can similarly engage in manifest dismantling of the structures, systems, and processes that work against equity, justice, and inclusion in institutions of cultural memory.

Chapter Eight: Institutions of Memory for the Anthropocene

What should institutions of memory become in the Anthropocene? This last chapter works to provide a synthesis of the previous chapters and offer both practical and more far-reaching recommendations for how memory work and memory institutions would change if we centered maintenance, care, and repair.

Maintenance is anti-hype. It is anti-unfettered growth. Maintenance about keeping things together. It’s about sustainability. If we got serious about focusing on maintenance and maintainability, we would be prioritizing a focus on a more sustainable pace of work, more modest goals for our work, and thinking more about the long-term costs and knock-on effects of new efforts and initiatives. 

Care is anti-individualist. It is about interdependence. Care is about tending, pruning, and gardening instead of building, demolition, and construction. If we center care in the work of memory institutions, we will be thinking about the networks of interdependence that emerge from memory institutions. Networks from the workers and labor of collecting and preserving, through the communities whose memories are recorded, documented and interpreted form collections. We would focus on cyclicality, of engagement and exploration and not on extraction and isolation. We would respect and honor memory as a living part of communities, identity and belonging.

Repair is anti-breaking. It’s about fixing. It’s about tweaking. It’s about finding where we are broken and mending not only to keep things working but to also try and make them better fit our needs and uses. We can identify what needs to be remodeled so that the lofty high-minded missions and visions of cultural heritage institutions better align with the lived experience of their function and operations. 

If we are serious about centering maintenance, care, and repair in memory institutions we need to replace the fear impulse that comes from narratives about navigating disruption and keeping up with the times and intentionally shift to longer term planning to develop robust and sustainable, in every sense of the words, infrastructures and engagement with our communities. We can strive to make sure that our institutions provide good jobs and to advocate for resources to support those good jobs. We can understand good jobs as positions that come with clear boundaries between work and the rest of life. As jobs that provide opportunities for people close to the work and the problems at hand both the ability to develop and improve their craft and the resources necessary to do their work in ways that don’t burn them out. We can prioritize the development and improvement of resilient and generous systems in our organizations that can support people enacting care. In this context, we can focus our efforts on how to support more holistic notions of outcomes that take in mind the varied and different issues that the communities we are entrusted to support memory for are directly engaged in and participants of.

A key tool for doing this work can be working to support broader systems thinking approaches to the problems we face. We can work to avoid reductionist models focused on single key metrics and instead focus deliberate time and attention in understanding the complexity that emerges from dynamic systems that span between people, culture, nature and technology. In all of this, if we center care in our work and our organizations, we will center allyship and the need to seek out reparative and restorative justice. At its heart chasing after innovation has been a process of fear. Fear of being left behind. In the wake of the disruption of innovation, in this time after disruption, we can accept our vulnerability as a starting point and stop thinking about how to do more with less and think more about what we should do with the limited time, space, resources, and connections we have to each other and our communities.

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