I grew up in Germany in the 1960s and 70s. The rubble was still recent enough that my parents and grandparents remembered it. And yet what I experienced as a child was something that was almost miraculous: things getting better. Visibly, measurably, undeniably better.
A childhood among kids freely roaming around in the green. Rights expanding. Women claiming space — in workrooms, in boardrooms, in public life. The environment moving up the political agenda. Customer rights – companies hold in balance. Movements forming around equality, dignity, justice. Not fast enough, never fast enough — but moving.
I was part of that movement as a witness first. It was the internet that turned me from observer into participant — and for a long time, that felt like the most hopeful thing imaginable.
More voices. More access.More euality. More connection. I was there at the beginning, an early member of The WELL, building digital media in the 1990s, believing with everything I had that this technology would deepen democracy, widen participation, give power back to the people. We really believed that. It was not naïve. It was a reasonable reading of what the technology made possible.
What we did not fully anticipate was who would get there first with the most money. The idealists built the road. The money built the toll booths.
What I watch now is something that demands a clear-eyed response — not despair, but urgency. Decisive, necessary actions. Democracies fraying. Rights rolling back. The values of the Enlightenment — reason, equality, the dignity of the individual — treated as optional, as inconvenient, as someone’s political agenda rather than hard-won human achievements. Capitalism, unconstrained and unquestioned, consuming the very things it was supposed to enable. The internet weaponised into the world’s most efficient machine for division, manipulation and control.
But here is what I know from forty years of living and watching: things change. Not by themselves — through people who decide they will. The movements that bent the arc of history were not made of exceptional human beings. They were made of ordinary people who saw clearly, stayed engaged, and refused to accept that the way things are is the way things have to be. People like you and me.
That knowledge is not abstract for me. I have seen a skatepark in a remote Indian village quietly dismantle a caste system. I have watched five teenagers set up a digital learning hub during a pandemic lockdown and hold a community together. I have experienced tribal leaders in Balochistan extend trust across a chain of people who do not even talk to each other — and watched that trust hold. Small things, you might say. And yes. But history is made of small things that accumulate.
The hope I carry is not the hope that someone will fix this. It is the hope that more people will decide — as they have decided before, in harder circumstances than these — that they are not willing to hand back what was built.
So that is why I write. Why I engage in discourse with the younger generation. Why I share these field notes, these questions, these perspectives from the edge of what I understand. Not because I have answers — but because trying to see clearly, from as many angles as possible, is the precondition for everything else. The platforms that were built to distract us still need our attention to function. The systems that were built to condition us still depend on our participation. Withdraw that participation — consciously, deliberately, with full awareness of what you are doing — and the equation begins to shift.
We did not fight for equality, for rights, for democratic participation, for a more open world, just to watch it unravel from our sofas.
We haven’t come this far to screw it up now. And I, for one, am not done yet.