What Do We Want the Future to Be?

Sometime in late June of 2011, I sat down at a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg with then-deputy editor Sean Yeaton. I'd been badgering him for months over email to give me a job at Motherboard before I decided to move to New York to bug him in person. I don't remember much about that lunch aside from wondering how to afford the meal while another guy, who I thought was perhaps Sean's boss but turned out to be an intern, talked my ear off at 100 miles an hour as Sean pulled his hair out while spinning through emails on his phone. I do distinctly remember telling my girlfriend that it went well. In the intervening years, Sean went on to become a rock star, a dad, and one of my best friends. As for myself, well, as a friend pointed out the other night while I was bitching about turning 30 later this year, I've spent most of my adult life at Motherboard. It's been my life, my identity, and the thing I'm most proud of working on. It still boggles my mind how many incredible people I've been able to work with over the years, and continue to do so now. This is obviously going somewhere, so I might as well get it out of the way: This is my last post as Motherboard's editor-in-chief. I'm not going far: I've been offered a position as executive editor for VICE's global editorial operations. An opportunity to work with VICE's global staff of journalists was not something I could turn down, considering that we've reached a nexus whereupon politicians are consolidating power on the backs of fear-mongering nationalism at the very same time that young people globally are both more connected and more concerned about asserting their own control over their futures.

I kinda doubt you'll even notice I'm gone, as everything that makes Motherboard great is the result of the incredibly hard work of every single journalist that appears on the site every day, as well as everyone else who makes the site live and breathe, including our publisher Thobey Campion; project managers; and design, data, and tech teams. I'll also be staying with Motherboard as an editor-at-large to help grow Motherboard around the globe, and am currently working on some super-secret projects that I think might blow your socks off, which is language I don't take lightly.

In the meantime, I wanted to pull at a thread that I've been tugging on since I first got here.

Motherboard has always had a bit of trouble defining what it is—what makes a Motherboard story a Motherboard story, if you like. It's something I've spent years poking at with Thobey and Motherboard's founding editor Alex Pasternack, along with everyone else who's passed through the site. Mechanically, it's easy to figure out: We've never wanted to waste our time reporting things other people already have, which means going just a bit deeper with a bit more analysis; being a bit more skeptical, or creative, or weird; or digging just a bit more for just a few more scoops. (If I may just toot a horn for Motherboarders past and present, their work has definitely resonated, as there are about 25 times more of you reading the site today than there were in 2011.)

But I think Motherboard's philosophy can only really be summed up by a question: What do we want the future to be?

It doesn't feel like it at the moment, but there have been points in history where, whatever the political viewpoints of people at the time, they generally agreed on the simple premise of progress. People rarely agree on how to get there, and few would say that today is as great as it could have been, but it's still better than yesterday.

Things have always improved, on average, over time. I say on average because the future has never been evenly distributed, as William Gibson once said. Motherboard has always skewed a bit bleak because we tend to cover the people getting hosed by the future, since they need the most help.

This implicit belief in some sort of base progress for humankind has been massively eroded by a combination of fear, unchecked growth in inequality, and a general yearning for the better days of yore—better days that never existed for many of us. I often think of a Pew study from 2014 that highlighted just how pessimistic America's older generations are about the financial prospects of their kids and youth as a whole. This sentiment has helped fuel the protective populism that put President Trump in the White House.

At the same time, those of us who actually have to live through the next 50 years are seeing the impending collapse of everything from our climate to our healthcare system, civil rights and privacy protections, basic security, herd immunity, the food system, the very concept of jobs, and so much more, and we're all left wondering what we can do about it when the usual human solution of progressing our way out of the problem runs counter to the prevailing sentiment of those in power.

It seems the one thing everyone agrees on these days is that we'd like to hit a reset button somewhere, but no one can agree on what they want to revert to. Unfortunately, time still only moves in one direction, and we'll all eventually be faced with the question of what we want the future to be. It's time we ask ourselves that now, and every day to come.

I have an idea of where to start: I think we all would agree that we want our future lives to be easier, healthier, and more prosperous; our future planet to be cleaner, more secure, and greener; and we all want to ensure future generations will continue to be able to progress down a path toward an even brighter tomorrow. How we get there is a matter for debate, but let's start with agreeing again that we want to get there.