I’ve been reflecting on the illusion of permanence—specifically, the seemingly stable environments in which parents wrap their children.
I grew up in the 90s, so pretending that the world was safe and predictable was an easy task for my parents. The economy was booming. (Houses for everyone!) The biggest military concern was a dust-up near Kuwait. (Where?) Communism was on the way out. (Oh Boris Yeltsin, how you are missed!) These are beats along the replay of a history I never actually learned well, because who cared? The future was bright, and with Silicon Valley leading the way, this new Internet thing held fathomless possibilities.
In hindsight, I realize how small a span of time this was—barely the span of a presidency—and how swiftly things can tilt.
In September of 2001, my childhood sense of stability came crashing down, but no, not with the Towers. I had just started my freshman year of college, and at that point, a young person is naturally ready to shake things up, to challenge their beliefs, and to tackle unpreparedness in general (particularly the academic variety). I studied the underpinnings of human behavior, and I produced essays contextualizing social injustices in America. Computer science skills seemed like a haphazard add-on; hacking away was just a throwback from my youth, where I was free to explore in the safe, confined neighborhoods of the fledgling online space. But the giants were coming: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and many others were about to make the virtual world anything but—to say nothing of the mobile revolution that would upend our understanding of connection further still.
In 2011 when I took the helm of TIC, I knew instinctively that something had happened and I had to try to digest it, as though preparing to regurgitate some profound nuggets of wisdom to my young hatchlings. I began the class with a melodramatic rant illustrating the neuropsychological impacts of Internet use. I raved about the passage from an “Age of Possibilities” to an “Age of Consequences.” I find myself now reflecting on the confluence of upheavals—social media, the war on terror, and my own entrance into adulthood and subsequent move to the Bay Area—that I will never be able to tell how much of my reality has been circumscribed by any one of them.
Yet I think I was on the right track.
The point of education is not to intimidate you with the complexities and turmoil that is truly out there, nor is it to provide a safe and steady platform where you can take your time to experiment while an adult holds your hand. It is training for the race against time: you’ll be inheriting a rapidly shifting landscape from the previous generation, and you’ll be swept away with it if you never learn to learn, to question, to process, to deal with the unknown. An educated mind is nimble.
I didn’t know it at the time, but when I threw together a new platform for TIC in 2011 (which would eventually become ATDP’s new website), I wasn’t bucking tradition—I was continuing it. From email to Manila to IoCM (and later, Tumblr), TIC has hopped from platform to platform, the format of the class continually evolving with the greater arc of social and technological progress.
Lloyd tried to tell me so, in fact, but I was probably too scared to understand what he really meant. Previously, the guidance of parents, the signposts of a prescribed academic path, and the script of entering the workforce out of college—these had all provided some semblance of predictability. But when I walked into TMF on the first day, a stranger to my students, and relatively green as a staff member, there was an opaque mist before me, one into which I had no choice but to venture. The unknown was daunting.
Seven years later, TIC faces homelessness. Its parent university is in financial straits. Even the Internet itself faces political crises on several fronts.
So it seems like a good time to shake things up.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, on this new platform, but that’s the point. This shift gives me an opportunity to test my own agility, lest I fall complacently into peddling dogma or taking my many blessings for granted. There is not an absence of fear, but there is also excitement and curiosity, as the mists continue to roll in once again—as they have so many times before.