Ezra Klein was in conversation with Avery Trufelman about utopias: “They all start with free love and end with capitalism.”

Capitalism is a religion. It is the fraud that we are all engaged in, whether we like it or not. The world as we know it is ending. Climate change is real. But we have no idea what to do about it. We don’t know how this story ends.

We thought we were building the infrastructure for sharing knowledge and information, to educate the world and raise humanity out of poverty, disease, and war.

Instead, the internet has become the vehicle for disinformation, poverty, disease, and war.

If we are focused on the aesthetics and functionality of a particular user interface, then we are doing user interface design.

If we are focused on the human motivations, the technological capacity, and the business strategy of building tools, infrastructure, and architecture, then we are doing user experience design.

We need to think like architects about the social, economic, and political implications of what we are doing.

• Social: does it meet a human need?
• Economic: given what is possible, can we use the available time, energy, and resources to accomplish it?
• Political: can we convince other people that it is important and valuable to invest in this course of action?

This is metaphysical design. These are the intangibles that we cannot reduce to measurements. We must decide what we value, and there are no physical, empirical methods for discovering these things, unless we reduce people to numbers, which is what capitalism does to humans. Humans are merely numbers on a balance sheet.

Exploring how we can imagine, design, and build the future together. We are documenting the work of a creative collaborative community with a focus on reimagining, redesigning, and rebuilding our social architecture.