A Lab for Human Flourishing
Introducing JPL Industrial Arts
Nothing in the first 25 years of my life could have prepared me for the endurance challenge of living through the 21st century.
I spent most of my adolescent and early adult years, roughly 1989–2000, dreaming of the future. My waking hours were enmeshed in some combination of art, design, reading, and making. I learned to code using HyperCard, made flyers for my friends’ bands in Photoshop 1.0, and obsessed over every William Gibson and Bruce Sterling book I could find. I read about emergent technologies in the pages of Wired and Mondo 2000, giddy with the possibilities of a new digital age.
Not long after the World Wide Web was born, I wrote my first HTML on a website hosted on a university server. To get that space, you had to walk up to a physical desk and fill out a sheet of paper. About a week later, I received an email with my website address and FTP instructions. I spent hours each day in my art department’s Digital Art Lab, working on hulking Macintosh computers with enormous CRT monitors, storing files on Zip drives, and dreaming about what we would be able to make in just a few years.
The web evolved, and I found my first jobs, first in technology and then in marketing. The dot-com bubble burst. The towers fell. Hurricane Katrina hit. Before long, I was running an agency I’d built, making websites for businesses in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Around the same time, Web 2.0 arrived, and the social media age began. Then came the 2008 financial crash. I spent the next decade helping build and market one of America’s great museums. Trump became president. COVID came. I decided to strike out on my own again, building marketing systems and managing media for small businesses.
Now large language models are gobbling up the knowledge and expertise I’ve spent a lifetime accumulating, packaging it into machine workflows.
Some of what these tools make possible is extraordinary. I’m still excited about making things with them. But somewhere along the way, my excitement about the future became tangled up with the exhaustion of trying to survive it. Every new possibility seems to arrive with another upheaval in the conditions of work, culture, and everyday life.
It often feels like a never-ending tsunami of shit. We’re caught in the turbulent slipstream of a fragmented society, watching our culture, economy, and political structures strain under one crisis after another.
How is this the future we ended up with? How the hell did we get here? And can we still make something better?
This experimental publication attempts to answer those questions. I want to examine the past, present, and possible futures of our world by looking closely at moments when new possibilities for human life emerged: what made them possible, what sustained them, and what eventually captured or diminished them.
Three questions will guide the investigation:
By flourishing, I mean having the security, time, and freedom to develop our abilities, care for one another, make meaningful things, and participate in shaping the world around us. There should be room in that definition for curiosity, pleasure, and beauty, too.
By investigating these questions, I hope to better understand our past, get a firmer grip on our present, and begin to imagine better futures. That last part feels especially difficult. When so much of our attention is consumed by responding to the immediate demands of life, imagining something beyond them can seem almost indulgent.
I want to make some room for it anyway.
